Rites And Symbols Of Initiation

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RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth

the text of this hook is printed
on 100% recycled paper

RITES AND SYMBOLS
OF INITIATION

The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth
MIRCEA ELIADE

Translated from the French
by Willard R. Trask

HARPER COLOPHON BOOKS
Harper & Row, Publishers
New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London

THE LIBRARY OF RELIGION AND CULTURE

General Editor: Benjamin Nelson

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

Copyright © 1958 by Mircea Eliadc

Printed in the United States of America.

All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be
used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per-
mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Pub-
lishers, Incorporated, 10 East 63 rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022 .

This book was first published by Harper & Brothers in 1958 under
the title Birth and Rebirth. It is here reprinted by arrangement.

First HARPER COLOPHON edition published 1975 by
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., New York, N.Y. 10022.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-10374

76 77 78 79 80 12 J1

CONTENTS

FOREWORD vii

INTRODUCTION ix

I INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS 1

Preliminary Remarks — ^Thc Sacred Ground — Separation
from the Mother — ^The Kurnai Initiation Mystery — Supreme
Being and Initiation Among the Yuin — Symbolism of
Initiatory Death — Meaning of the Initiatory Ordeals —
Initiation and Collective Regeneration

n THE INITIATORY ORDEALS 21

The Bull-Roarer and Circumcision — Symbolism of Subin-
cision — Initiation in Tierra del Fuego— Scenarios of Initi-
atory Death — Being Swallowed by a Monster

III FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS 41

Initiation of Girls — Degrees in Female Initiations — An
Extant Australian Secret Cult — Initiatory Symbolisms of
Return to the Womb — Symbolism of New Birth in Indian
Initiations — Multiple Meanings of the Symbolism of the
Embryo

IV INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 61

Descent to the Underworld and Heroic Initiations — Initi-
atory Symbolism of the Symplegades — Individual Initiations:

North America — Kwakiutl Dancing Societies — Men’s Secret
Societies — Initiatory Motifs Common to Puberty Rites and
Secret Societies

V HEROIC AND SHAMANIC INITIATIONS 81

Going Berserk — Cuchulainn’s Initiation — Symbolism of
Magical Heat — Shamanic Initiations — Initiatory Ordeals of

V

vi

CONTENTS

Siberian Shamans — Public Rites of Shamanic Initiations —
Techniques of Ecstasy — Initiations of Australian Medicine
Men — ^Asiatic Influences in Australia

VI PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS 103

India — ^Traces of Puberty Rites in Ancient Greece — Eleusis
and the Hellenistic Mysteries — Christianity and Initiation
— Survival of Initiatory Motifs in Christian Europe —
Patterns of Initiation and Literary Themes — Concluding
Remarks — Epilogue

NOTES 137

INDEX 167

FOREWORD

This book represents the Haskell Lectures which I was priv-
ileged to deliver at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1956
under the title “Patterns of Initiation.” In preparing the text for
publication, I have added an Introduction and some notes and
bibliograpWcal references, but I have adhered to the presentation
demanded by the original oral delivery. As I conceive it, the book-
is addressed to any nonspecialist reader interested in the spiritual
history of humanity. It is for this reason that I have limited myself
to depicting the complex phenomenon of initiation only in broadest
outline. More detailed studies of certain aspects are contained in
some of my earlier publications.^ I shall return to the problem in
a book now in preparation. Death and Initiation.

I wish once again to express my gratitude here to the Chancellor
of the University of Chicago, to the Committee for the Haskell
Lectures, and to the Dean of the Federated Theological Faculty of
the University of Chicago for the honor that they conferred on me
by inviting me to give the 1956 Haskell Lectures. The Bollingen
Foundation has generously undertaken to defray the expense of the
EngUsh translation; may the Trustees rest assured of my gratitude.

I also wish to thank my translator, Mr. Willard R. Trask, for the
pains he took to provide a faithful reproduction of my thought and
my text in speakable English.

MIRCEA ELIADE

Department of History of Religions
University of Chicago
April, 1958

vU

INTRODUCTION

It has often been said that one of the characteristics of the modem
world is the disappearance of any meaningful rites of initiation.
Of primary importance in traditional societies, in the modem
Western world significant initiation is practically nonexistent.
To be sure, the several Christian communions preserve, in varying
degrees, vestiges of a mystery that is initiatory in stmcture. Baptism
is essentially an initiatory rite; ordination to the priesthood com-
prises an initiation. But it must not be forgotten that Christianity
triumphed in the world and became a universal religion only be-
cause it detached itself from the climate of the Greco-Oriental
mysteries and proclaimed itself a religion of salvation accessible
to all.

Then, too, we may well ask whether the modem world as a whole
can still justifiably be called Christian. If a “modem man” does
indeed exist, it is in so far as he refuses to recognize himself in
terms familiar to the Christian view of man or, as European
scholars express it, in terms of Christian “anthropology.”
Modem man’s originality, his newness in comparison with tradi-
tional societies, lies precisely in his determination to regard himself
as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically
desacralized cosmos. To what extent modem man has succeeded in
realizing his ideal is another problem, into which we shall not
enter here. But the fact remains that his ideal no longer has any-
thing in common with the Christian message, and that it is equally
foreign to the image of himself conceived by the man of the
traditional societies.

It is through the initiation rite that the man of the traditional
societies comes to know and to assume this image. Obviously there
are numerous types and countless variants of initiation, correspond-
ing to different social stmctures and cultural horizons. But the im-
portant fact is that all premodem societies (that is, those that
lasted in Western Europe to the end of the Middle Ages, and in the

ix

X

INTRODUCTION

test of the world to the first World War) accord primary importance
to the ideology and techniques of initiation.

The term initiation in the most general sense denotes a body of
rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to produce a decisive al-
teration in the religious and social status of the person to be initiated.
In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in
existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed
with a totally different being from that which he possessed before
his initiation; he has become another. Among the various categories
of initiation, the puberty initiation is particularly important for an
understanding of premodern man. These “transition rites’’^ are
obligatory for all the youth of the tribe. To gain the right to be
admitted among adults, the adolescent has to pass through a series
of initiatory ordeals: it is by virtue of these rites, and of the revela-
tions that they entail, that he will be recognized as a responsible
member of the society. Initiation introduces the candidate into
the human community and into the world of spiritual and cultural
values. He learns not only the behavior patterns, the techniques,
and the institutions of adults but also the sacred myths and tradi-
tions of the tribe, the names of the gods and the history of their
works; above all, he learns the mystical relations between the tribe
and the Supernatural Beings as those relations were established
at the beginning of Time.

Every primitive society possesses a consistent body of mythical
traditions, a “conception of the world”; and it is this conception
that is gradually revealed to the novice in the course of his initiation.
What is involved is not simply instruction in the modern sense of
the word. In order to become worthy of the sacred teaching, the
novice must first be prepared spiritu^y. For what he learns con-
cerning the world and human life does not constitute knowledge in
the modem sense of the term, objective and compartmentalized in-
formation, subject to indefinite correction and a^ition. The world
is the work of Supernatural Beings — a divine work and hence
sacred in its very stmcture. Man lives in a universe that is not only
supernatural in origin, but is no less sacred in its form, sometimes
even in its substance. The world has a “history”: first, its creation
Supernatural Beings; then, everything that took place after that
— ^the coming of the civilizing Hero or the mythical Ancestor, their
cultural activities, their demiurgic adventures, and at last their
disappearance.

This “sacred history” — ^mythology — ^is exemplary, paradigmatic:

INTRODUCTION

XI

not only does it relate how things came to be; it also lays the founda-
tions for all human behavior and all social and cultural institutions.
From the fact that man was created and civilized by Supernatural
Beings, it follows that the sum of his behavior and activities belongs
to sacred history; and this history must be carefully preserved and
transmitted intact to succeeding generations. Basically, man is what
he is because, at the dawn of Time, certain things happened to him,
the things narrated by the myths. Just as modern man proclaims
himself a historical being, constituted by the whole history of hu-
manity, so the man of archaic societies considers himself the end
product of a mythical history, that is, of a series of events that took
place in illo tempore, at the beginning of Time. But whereas modern
man sees in the history that precedes him a purely human work
and, more especially, believes that he has the power to continue and
perfect it indefinitely, for the man of traditional societies everything
significant — that is, everything creative and powerful — that has ever
happened took place in the beginning, in the Time of the myths.

In one sense it could almost be said that for the man of archaic
societies history is “closed”; that it exhausted itself in the few stu-
pendous events of the beginning. By revealing the different modes
of deep-sea fishing to the Polynesians at the beginning of Time, the
mythical Hero exhausted all the possible forms of that activity at
a single stroke; since then, whenever they go fishing, the Polynesians
repeat the exemplary gesture of the mythical Hero, that is, they
imitate a transhuman model.

But, properly considered, this history preserved in the myths is
closed only in appearance. If the man of primitive societies had
contented himself with forever imitating the few exemplary gestures
revealed by the myths, there would be no explaining the countless
innovations that he has accepted during the course of Time. No
such thing as an absolutely closed primitive society exists. We know
of none that has not borrowed some cultural elements from outside;
none that, as the result of these borrowings, has not changed at least
some aspects of its institutions; none that, in short, has had no
history. But, in contrast to modern society, primitive societies have
accepted all innovations as so many “revelations,” hence as having a
superhuman origin. The objects or weapons that were borrowed,
the behavior patterns and institutions that were imitated, the myths
or beliefs that were assimilated, were believed to be charged with
magico-religious power; indeed, it was for this reason that they had
been noticed and the effort made to acquire them. Nor is this all.

xii

INTRODUCTION

These elements were adopted because it was believed that the
Ancestors had received the first cultural revelations from Super-
natural Beings. And since traditional societies have no historical
memory in the strict sense, it took only a few generations, sometimes
even less, for a recent innovation to be invested with all the prestige
of the primordial revelations.

In the last analysis we could say that, though they are “open”
to history, traditional societies tend to project every new acquisition
into the primordial Time, to telescope all events in the same
atemporal horizon of the mythical be ginning s. Primitive societies
too are changed by their history, although sometimes only to a very
small degree; but what radically differentiates them from modem
society is the absence of historical consciousness in them. Indeed,
its absence is inevitable, in view of the conception of Time and the
anthropology that are characteristic of all pre-Judaic humanity.

It is to tMs traditional knowledge that the novices gain access.
They receive protracted instruction from their teachers, witness
secret ceremonies, undergo a series of ordeals. And it is primarily
these ordeals that constitute the religious experience of initiation —
the encounter with the sacred. The majority of initiatory ordeals
more or less clearly imply a ritual death foUowed by resurrection
or a new birth. The central moment of every initiation is represented
by the ceremony symbolizing the death of the novice and his return
to the fellowship of the living. But he returns to life a new man,
assuming another mode of being. Initiatory death signifies the end
at once of childhood, of ignorance, and of the profane condition.

For archaic thought, nothing better expresses the idea of an end,
of the final completion of anything, than death, just as nothing better
expresses the idea of creation, of making, building, constmcting,
than the cosmogony. The cosmogonic myth serves as the
paradigm, the exemplary model, for every kind of making. Nothing
better ensures the success of any creation (a village, a house, a
child) than the fact of copying it after the greatest of all creations,
the cosmogony. Nor is tMs all. Since in the eyes of the primitives
the cosmogony primarily represents the manifestation of the creative
power of the gods, and therefore a prodigious irruption of the
sacred, it is periodically reiterated in order to regenerate the world
and human society. For symbolic repetition of the creation implies a
reactualization of the primordial event, hence the presence of the
Gods and their creative energies. The return to be ginning s finds
e:q>ression in a reactivation of the sacred forces that had then been

INTRODUCTION

xiii

manifested for the first time. If the world was restored to the state
in which it had been at the moment when it came to birth, if the
gestures that the Gods had made for the first time in the beginning
were reproduced, society and the entire cosmos became what they
had been then — ^pure, powerful, effectual, with all their possibilities
intact.

Every ritual repetition of the cosmogony is preceded by a sym-
bolic retrogression to Chaos. In order to be created anew, the old
world must first be annihilated. The various rites performed in con-
nection with the New Year can be put in two chief categories:
(1) those that signify the return to Chaos (e.g., extinguishing fires,
expelling “evil” and sins, reversal of habitual behavior, orgies, return
of the dead) ; (2) those that symbolize the cosmogony (e.g., lighting
new fires, departure of the dead, repetition of the acts by which the
Gods created the world, solemn prediction of the weather for the en-
suing year). In the scenario of initiatory rites, “death” corresponds
to the temporary return to Chaos; hence it is the paradigmatic ex-
pression of the end of a mode of being — the mode of ignorance and
of the child’s irresponsibility. Initiatory death provides the clean
slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is
the formation of a new man. We shall later describe the different
modalities of birth to a new, spiritual life. But now we must note
that this new life is conceived as the true human existence, for it is
open to the values of spirit. What is understood by the generic term
“culture,” comprising all the values of spirit, is accessible only to
those who have been initiated. Hence participation in spiritual life is
made possible by virtue of the religious experiences released during
initiation.

All the rites of rebirth or resurrection, and the symbols that they
imply, indicate that the novice has attained to another mode of
existence, inaccessible to those who have not undergone the initia-
tory ordeals, who have not tasted death. We must note this charac-
teristic of the archaic mentality: the belief that a state cannot be
changed without first being annihilated — in the present instance,
without the child’s dying to childhood. It is impossible to exaggerate
the importance of this obsession with beginnings, which, in sum, is
the obsession with the absolute beginning, the cosmogony. For
a thing to be well done, it must be done as it was done the first time.
But the first time, the thing — ^this class of objects, this animal, this
particular behavior — did not exist: when, in the beginning, this
object, this animal, this institution, came into existence, it was as if,

XIV

INTRODUCTION

through the power of the Gods, being arose from nonbeing.

Initiatory death is indispensable for the beginning of spiritual
life. Its function must be understood in relation to what it prepares:
birth to a higher mode of being. As we shall see farther on, initia-
tory death is often symbolized, for example, by darkness, by cosmic
night, by the telluric womb, the hut, the belly of a monster. All
these images express regression to a preformal state, to a latent
mode of being (complementary to the precosmogonic Chaos),
rather than total annihilation (in the sense in which, for example, a
member of the modern societies conceives death) . These images and
symbols of ritual death are inextricably connected with germination,
with embryology; they already indicate a new life in course of
preparation. Obviously, as we shall show later, there are other
valuations of initiatory death — ^for example, joining the com-
pany of the dead and the Ancestors. But here again we can discern
the same symbolism of the beginning: the beginning of spiritual
life, made possible in this case by a meeting with spirits.

For archaic thought, then, man is made — he does not make him-
self all by himself. It is the old initiates, the spiritual masters, who
make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at
the beginning of Time by the Supernatural Beings. They are only
the representatives of those Beings; indeed, in many cases they
incarnate them. This is as much as to say that in order to become
a man, it is necessary to resemble a mythical model. Man recog-
nizes himself as such (that is, as man) to the extent to which he is
no longer a “natural man,” to which he is made a second time, in
obedience to a paradigmatic and transhuman canon. The initiatory
new birth is not natural, though it is sometimes expressed in obstetric
symbols. This birth requires rites instituted by the Supernatural
Beings; hence it is a divine work, created by the power and will of
those Beings; it belongs, not to nature (in the modern, secularized
sense of the term), but to sacred history. The second, initiatory
birth does not repeat the first, biological birth. To attain the initiate’s
mode of being demands knowing realities that are not a part of
nature but of the biography of the Supernatural Beings, hence of the
sacred history preserved in the myths.

Even when they appear to be dealing only with natural phenom-
ena — with the course of the sun, for example — the myths refer to
a reality that is no longer the reality of Nature as modern man knows
it today. For the primitive, nature is not simply natural; it is at the
same time supernature, that is, manifestation of sacred forces and

INTRODUCTION

XV

figure of traoscendental realities. To know the myths is not (as was
thought in the past century) to become aware of the regularity of
certain cosmic phenomena (the course of the sun, the lunar cyde,
the rhythm of vegetation, and the like ) ; it is, first of all, to know
what .has happened in the world, has really happened, what the
Gods and the civilizing Heroes did — their works, adventures,
dramas. Thus it is to know a divine history — ^which nonetheless
remains a “history,” that is, a series of events ^at are unforeseeable,
though consistent and significant.

In modern terms we could say that initiation puts an end to the
natural man and introduces the novice to culture. But for archaic
societies, culture is not a human product, its origin is supernatural.
Nor is this all. It is through culture that man re-establishes contact
with the world of the Gods and other Supernatural Beings and
participates in their creative energies. The world of Supernatural
Beings is the world in which things took place for the first time —
the world in which the first tree and the first animal came into
existence; in which an act, thenceforth religiously repeated, was
performed for the first time (to walk in a particular posture, to dig
a particular edible root, to go hunting during a particular phase of
the moon) ; in which the Gods or the Heroes, for example, had such
and such an encounter, suffered such and such a misadventure,
uttered particular words, proclaimed particular norms. The
myths lead us into a world that cannot be described but only “nar-
rated,” for it consists in the history of acts freely undertaken, of
unforeseeable decisions, of fabulous transformations, and the l^e.
It is, in short, the history of everything significant that has happened
since the Creation of the world, of all the events that contributed to
making man as he is today. The novice whom intiation introduces
to the mythological traditions of the tribe is introduced to the sacred
history of the world and humanity.

It is for this reason that initiation is of such importance for a
knowledge of premodem man. It reveals the almost awesome seri-
ousness with which the man of archaic societies assumed the re-
sponsibility of receiving and transmitting spiritual values.

CHAPTER I

Initiation Mysteries in Primitive Religions

Preliminary Remarks

In this book I shall present the most important types of initiation,
seeking above all to decipher their deeper meaning. The meaning
is always religious, for the change of existential status in the novice
is produced by a religious experience. The initiate becomes another
man because he has had a crucial revelation of the world and life.
I shall therefore treat this important and difficult problem in the
perspective of the history of religion and not, as is usually done, in
the perspectives of cultural anthropology or of sociology. Several
excellent studies have been written from these points of view; I need
only mention two at this time, those of Heinrich Schurtz and Hutton
Webster.^ The historian of religion will always make use — and
most profitable use — of the results attained by the ethnologist and
the sociologist; but he has to complement these results and give
them their due place in a different and broader perspective. The
ethnologist is concerned only with the societies that we call
primitive, whereas the historian of religion will include the entire
religious history of humanity in his field of investigation, from the
earliest cults in palaeolithic times of which we have records down
to modem religious movements. To understand the meaning and
the role of initiation, the historian of religion will cite not only the
rituals of primitive peoples but also the ceremonies of the Greco-
Oriental mysteries or of Indo-Tibetan Tantrism, the initiation
rites of the Scandinavian berserkers or the initiatory ordeals that are
still traceable even in the experiences of the great mystics.

1

2

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INmATION

The his torian of religion parts company with the sociologist too,
since his primary concern is to understand the religious experience
of initiation and to interpret the deeper meaning of the symbolisms
present in initiatory myths and rites. In short, the ambition of the
historian of religion is to arrive at the existential situation assumed
by religious man in the experience of initiation, and to make that
primordial experience intelligible to his contemporaries.

Generally speaking, the history of religion distinguishes three
categories, or types, of initiations. The first category comprises the
collective rituals whose function is to effect the transition from
childhood or adolescence to adulthood, and which are obligatory
for all members of a particular society. Ethnological literature
terms these rituals “puberty rites,” “tribal initiation,” or “initia-
tion into an age group.”

The other two categories of initiations differ from puberty
initiations in that they are not obligatory for all members of the
community and that most of them are performed individually or
for comparatively small groups. The second category includes all
types of rites for entering a secret society, a Bund, or a confraternity.
These secret societies are limited to one sex and are extremely
jealous of their respective secrets. Most of them are male and
constitute secret fraternities iMannerbiinde)’, but there are also
some female secret societies. On the level of primitive cultures,
societies open to both sexes are extremely rare; where they exist,
they usually represent a phenomenon of degeneration. But in the
ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, the mysteries were
open to both sexes; and although they are a little different in type,
we can put the Greco-Oriental mysteries in the category of secret
confraternities.

Finally, there is a third category of initiation — ^the type that
occurs in connection with a mystical vocation; that is, on the level
of primitive religions, the vocation of the medicine man or the
shaman. A specific characteristic of this third category is the
importance t^t personal experience assumes in it. Broadly
speaking, we can say that those who submit themselves to the
ordeals typical of this third kind of initiation are — ^whether volun-
tarily of involuntarily — destined to participate in a more intense
religious experience Aan is accessible to the rest of the community.
I said “voluntarily or involuntarily” because a member of a com-
munity can become a medicine man or a shaman not only in con-
sequence of a personal decision to acquire reli^ous powers (the

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

3

process called “the quest”) but also through vocation (“the call”),
that is, because he is forced by Superhuman Beings to become a
medicine man or shaman.

I may add that these last two categories — ^initiation imposed
upon entrance to a secret society, and initiation requisite for ob-
taining a higher religious status — have a good deal in common.
They might even be regarded as two varieties of a single clas&i
What principally tends to distinguish them is the element of ecstasy,
which is of great importance in shamanic initiations. I may add
too that there is a sort of structural common denominator among
all these categories of initiation, with the result that, from a certain
point of view, all initiations are much alike. But it seemed best to
begin by drawing a few guiding lines in this extremely wide field,
for without them we might easily get lost. In the course of the
following pages, I shall have occasion to supplement and amend
these few preliminary remarks.

Initiation represents one of the most significant spiritual phe-
nomena in the history of humanity. It is an act that involves not
only the religious life of the individual, in the modem meaning of
the word “religion”; it involves his entire life. It is through initiation
that, in primitive and archaic societies, man becomes what he is and
what he should be — a being open to the life of the spirit, hence
one who participates in the culture into which he was bora. For as
we shall soon see, the puberty initiation represents above all the
revelation of the sacred — and, for the primitive world, the sacred
means not only everything that we now understand by religion, but
also the whole body of the tribe*s mythological and cultural tradi--
tions. In a great many cases puberty rites, in one way or another,
imply the revelation of sexuality — but, for the entire premodem
world, sexuality too participates in the sacred. In short, through
initiation, the candidate passes beyond the natural mode — ^the mode
of the child — and gains access to the cultural mode; that is, he is
introduced to spiritual values. From a certain point of view it could
almost be said that, for the primitive world, it is through initiation
that men attain the status of human beings; before initiation, they
do not yet fully share in the human condition precisely because
they do not yet have access to the religious life. This is why initia-
tion represents a decisive experience for any individual who is a
member of a premodera society; it is a fundamental existential
experience because through it a man becomes able to assume his
mode of being in its entirety.

4

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

As we shall presently see, the puberty initiation begins with an
act of rupture — ^the child or the adolescent is separated from his
mother, and sometimes the separation is performed in a decidedly
brutal way. But the initiation is not the concern only of the young
novices. The ceremony involves the tribe as a whole. A new genera-
tion is instructed, is made fit to be integrated into the community
of adults. And on this occasion, through the repetition, the reactu-
alization, of the traditional rites, the entire community is regener-
ated. This is why, in primitive societies, initiations are among the
most important of religious festivals.

The Sacred Ground

Since the Australian puberty ceremonies represent a compara-
tively archaic form of initiation, I shall turn to them for our first
examples. Usually a considerable number of tribes take part in the
ceremony, hence the preparations for an initiation festival require
a long time. Several months pass between the time when the older
men decide to assemble the tribes and the beginning of the ceremony
proper. The headman of the inviting tribe sends messengers, carry-
ing bull-roarers (long, thin, narrow pieces of wood attached to a
string; when whirled through the air, they make a roaring sound) , to
the other headmen, to whom they announce the decision. Since
the Australian tribes are divided into two intermarrying “classes,”
class A undertakes the initiation of the youths of class B, and vice
versa.® In short, the novices are initiated by their potential fathers-
in-law.® It is unnecessary to rehearse all the details of the prepara-
tion for the “bora,” as the ceremony is called among the tribes of
eastern Australia. Only one fact requires mention; in everything
that is done, the greatest precautions are taken to keep the women
from knowing what is afoot.

Broadly speaking, the initiation ceremony comprises the follow-
ing phases: first, the preparation of the “sacred ground,” where
the men will remain in isolation during the festival; second, the
separation of the novices from their mothers and, in general, from
all women; third, their segregation in the bush, or in a special
isolated camp, where they will be instructed in the religious tradi-
tions of the tribe; fourth, certain operations performed on the
novices, usually circumcision, the extraction of a tooth, or subin-
cision, but sometimes scarring or pulling out the hair. Throughout
the period of the initiation, the novices must behave in a special
way; they undergo a number of ordeals, and are subjected to various

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

5

dietary taboos and prohibitions. Each element of this complex initia-
tory scenario has a religious meaning. It is primarily these meanings,
and their articulation into a religious* vision of the world, that I
hope to bring out in these pages.

As we just saw, the bora always involves the preliminary prepara-
tion of a sacred ground. The Yuin, the Wiradjuri, the Kamilaroi,
and some of the Queensland tribes prepare a circular ring of earth,
in which the preliminary ceremonies will later take place, and, at
some distance from it, a small sacred enclosure. These two con-
structions are connected by a path, along which the men of the
inviting tribe set up various images and sacred emblems. As the
tribal contingents arrive, the men are led along the path and shown
the images. There is dancing every night, sometimes continuing for
several weeks, until the last contingent arrives.^

Mathews gives a quite detailed description of the sacred ground
as prepared by the Kamilaroi. It consists of two circles. The larger,
which is seventy feet in diameter, has a pole three yards high in
the center “with a bunch of emu’s feathers tied on the top.”® In
the smaller circle two young trees are fixed in the ground with their
roots in the air. After the ritual separation from the women, two
older men — sometimes described as wizards — climb these trees and
there chant the traditions of the bora.® (These trees, which are
anointed with human blood,'^ have a symbolism that we shall in-
vestigate later.) The two circles are connected by a path. On either
side of the path a number of figures are drawn on the ground or
modeled in clay. The largest, which is fifteen feet in height, is that
of the Supreme Being, Baiamai. A couple represents the mythical
Ancestors, and a group of twelve human figures stands for the young
men who were with Baiamai in his first camp. Other figures repre-
sent animals and nests. The neophytes are not allowed to look at
these images, which will be destroyed by fire before the end of their
initiation. But they can examine them on the occasion of the next
bora.® This detail is interesting; it shows that religious instruction
does not end with initiation, but continues and has several degrees.

According to Mathews, the “bora ground represents Baiamai’s
first camp, the people who were with him while there and the gifts
he presented them with.”® This is to say that the participants in the
initiation ceremony reactualize the mythical period in which the
bora was held for the first time. Not only does the sacred ground
imitate the exemplary model, Baiamai’s first camp, but the ritual

6 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

performed reiterates Baiamai’s gestures and acts. In short, what is
involved is a reactualization of Baiamai’s creative work, and hence
a regeneration of the world. For the sacred ground is at once an
image of the world {imago mundi) and a world sanctified by the
presence of the Divine Being. During the bora the participants
return to the mythical, sacred time when Baiamai was present on
earth and founded the mysteries that are now being performed. The
participants become in some sort contemporaries of the first bora,
the bora that took place in the beginning, in the Dream Time
{bugari or “Alchera times”), to use the Australian expression. This
is why the initiation ceremonies are so important in the lives of the
aborigines; by performing them, they reintegrate the sacred Time
of the beginning of things, they commune with the presence of
Baiamai and the other mythical Beings, and, finally, they regene-
rate the world, for the world is renewed by the reproduction of its
exemplary model, Baiamai’s first camp.

Since the initiation ceremonies were founded by the Divine
Beings or the mythical Ancestors, the primordial Time is reinte-
grated whenever they are performed. This is true not only for the
Australians, but for the entire primitive world. For what is involved
here is a fundamental conception in archaic religions — the repeti-
tion of a ritual founded by Divine Beings implies the reactualization
of the original Time when the rite was first performed. This is why
a rite has efficacy — it participates in the completeness of the sacred
primordial Time. The rite makes the myth present. Everything that
the myth tells of the Time of beginning, the **bugari times,” the
rite reactualizes, shows it as happening, here and now. When the
Bad, a West Kimberley tribe, prepare to initiate the boys, the old
men withdraw to the forest and look for the ganbor tree “under
which Djamar” — ^their Supreme Being — ^“rested in ancestral times.”
A witch doctor, who goes ahead, “has the task to discover the tree.”
When it is found, the men surround it, singing, and then cut it down
with their flint knives.^® The mythical tree is made present.

All the gestures and operations that succeed one another during
the initiation are only the repetition of exemplary models — that is,
gestures and operations that were performed, in mythical times, by
the founders of the ceremonies. This very fact makes them sacred,
and their periodical reiteration regenerates the entire religious life
of the community. Sometimes there are gestures whose meaning
seems to have been forgotten, but which are still repeated because
they were made by the mythical beings when the ceremony was

INITUTION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS 7

inaugurated. Among the Arunta, at a particular point in the cere-
mony a woman lifts the novice onto her shoulders; and the explana-
tion given is that, by performing this gesture, she is imitating what
the Unthippa women did in the mythical Time (alcheringa)

To return to our subject: the sacred ground plays an essential
role in Australian initiation ceremonies because it represents the
image of the primordial world as it was when the Divine Being was
on earth. The women, children, and uninitiated are kept at a dis-
tance, and even the novices will acquire merely a superficial knowl-
edge of it. Only as initiates, at the time of the next bora, will they
examine the images set along the path between the two circles.
Having been taught the mythology of the tribe, they will be able to
understand the symbols.

Separation from the Mother

The separation of the novices from their mothers takes place
more or less dramatically, in accordance with the customs of differ-
ent tribes. The least dramatic method is found among the Kumai,
where the initiation ceremony is in any case quite simple. The
mothers sit behind the novices; the men come forward in single file
between the two groups and so separate them. The instructors raise
the novices into the air several times, the novices stretching their
arms as far as possible toward the sky. The meaning of this gesture
is clear; the neophytes are being consecrated to the Sky God. They
are then led into the sacred enclosure, where, lying on their backs
with their arms crossed on their chests, they are covered with rugs.
From then on they see and hear nothing. After a montonous song,
they fall asleep; later, the women withdraw. “If a woman,” a
Kumai headman said to Howitt, “were to see these things, or hear
what we tell the boys, I would kill her.”^^

Among the Yuin — as among some other Australian tribes — ^the
novice is put under the charge of two guardians. Throughout the
initiation, these guardians prepare his food, bring him water, and
instruct him in the traditional myths and legends, the powers of
the medicine man, and his duties to the tribe. One night a great fire
is lighted and the guardians carry the novices to it on their shoulders.
The novices are told to look at the fire and not to move, no matter
what may happen. Behind them their mothers gather, completely
covered with branches. For ten or twelve minutes the boys are
“roasted” at the fire.^^ When the chief medicine man considers that
this first ordeal has lasted long enough and that the novices have

8

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INUIAUON

been sufficiently roasted, the bull-roarers are sounded behind the
row of women. At this signal the guardians make the boys run to the
sacred enclosure, where they are ordered to lie down wiffi their faces
to the ground and are covered with opossum skins and rugs. Soon
afterward the women are given permission to rise, and they retire a
few miles away, where they set up a new camp. The first initiation
ceremony, comprising the separation from the women and the
ordeal by fire, is thus completed. From that night on the novices
share only in the life of the men.^^

Among the Murring, the separation is more abrupt and dramatic.
Covered with blankets, the women sit down on the ground with
their boys in front of them. At a particular moment the novices are
seized by the men, who come up running, and they run away
together.^®

The Wiradjuri call the initiation ceremonies Guringal, “belonging
to the bush.” The scenario is the same: according to Howitt, the
women are covered with branches and blankets; the novices are
seized by their guardians and carried ofl[ to the forest, where they
are daubed with red ocher.^® Mathews gives a fuller and livelier
description; a group of men arrives from the direction of the
sacred ground, sounding bull-roarers, beating the ground with rods,
and throwing burning sticks. Meanwhile, other men quietly seize
the boys and lead them some distance away. When the women and
children are allowed to look, they see nothing but ashes and burn-
ing sticks all about them, and they are told that Daramulun tried
to burn them when he came to take the novices.^^

The meaning of this first part of the ceremony, the separation of
the neophytes from their mothers, seems quite clear. What we have
is a break, sometimes quite a violent break, with the world of child-
hood — ^which is at once the maternal and female world and the
child’s state of irresponsibility and happiness, of ignorance and
asexuality. The break is made in such a way as to produce a strong
impression both on the mothers and the novices. In fact, in the case
of nearly all Australian tribes the mothers are convinced that their
sons will be killed and eaten by a hostile and mysterious divinity,
whose name they do not know, but whose voice they have heard
in the terrifying soimd of the bull-roarers. They are assured, of
course, that the divinity wiQ soon resuscitate the novices in the
form of grown men, that is, of initiates. But in any case the novices
die to childhood, and the mothers have a foreboding that the boys
will never again be what they were before initiation: their children.

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

9

When the lads finally come back to the camp, the mothers touch
them to make sure that they are really their sons. Among some
Australian tribes — as among other peoples too — the mothers mourn
over the initiands as the dead are mourned.

As for the novices, their experience is still more decisive. For
the first time they feel religious fear and terror, for they are told
beforehand that they will be captured and killed by Divine Beings.
As long as they were considered to be children, they took no part
in the religious life of the tribe. If by chance they had heard refer-
ences to the mysterious Beings, and scraps of myths and legends,
they did not realize what was in question. They had perhaps seen
dead people, but it did not occur to them that death was something
that concerned themselves. For them, it was an exterior “thing,” a
mysterious event that happened to other people, especially to the
old. Now, suddenly, they are torn from their blissful childhood un-
consciousness, and are told that they are to die, that they will be
killed by the divinity. The very act of separation from their mothers
fills them with forebodings of death — for they are seized by un-
known, often masked men, carried far from their familiar surround-
ings, laid on the ground, and covered with branches.

For the first time they face an unfamiliar experience of dark-
ness. This is not the darkness that they have known hitherto, the
natural phenomenon of night — a night that was never wholly dark,
for there were the stars, the moon, fires — ^but an absolute and
menacing darkness, peopled with mysterious beings and above all
made terrifying by the approach of the divinity announced by the
bull-roarers. This experience of darkness, of death, and of the near-
ness of Divine Beings will be continually repeated and deepened
throughout the initiation. As we shall see, a considerable number
of initiation rites and ordeals reactualize the motif of death in dark-
ness and at the hands of Divine Beings. But it is important to em-
phasize that the very first act of the ceremony already implies the
experience of death, for the novices are violently flung into an
unknown world, where the presence of Divine Beings is sensed
through the terror that they inspire.

The maternal universe was that of the profane world. The uni-
verse that the novices now enter is that of the sacred world. Between
the two, there is a break, a rupture of continuity. Passing from the
profane to the sacred world in some sort implies the experience of
death; he who makes the passage dies to one life in order to gain
access to another. In the example we are considering, the novice

10 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

dies to childhood and to the irresponsibility of the child’s existence
— ^that is, profane existence — ^in order to gain access to a higher
life, the life where participation in the sacred becomes possible.

The Kumai Initiation Mystery

AU this wUl be more clearly apparent when we see what hap-
pens to the novices after they have been taken in charge by their
instructors. To give a better idea of the interconnections between
the various ritual and ideological moments that go to make up an
initiation ceremony, I shall describe some of these ceremonies in
their entirety, that is, without dividing them up in order to discuss
their motifs separately. This inevitably involves a certain amount of
repetition, but I know no other way to display the succession of
ritual moments and, in so doing, to bring out the structures of
different initiation ceremonies. I shall begin with the simplest and
least dramatic, the ceremony performed by the Kurnai. You will
remember that we left the novices, sitting on the ground in the
sacred enclosure and covered with rugs, falling asleep after a mo-
notonous chant. When they wake they are invested with a “belt of
manhood,” and their instruction begins.

The central mystery of the initiation is called “Showing the
Grandfather.” One day the novices are again made to lie on the
ground and rugs are put over their heads. The men approach,
whirling bull-roarers. The headman tells the novices to throw off
the rugs and to look at the sky and then at the men who are carry-
ing the bull-roarers. Then two old men say to them: “You must
never tell this. You must not tell your mother, nor your sister, nor
any who is not jeraeil,” that is, who is not initiated. They are shown
the two bull-roarers — one of which is larger, the other smaller, and
which are called “man” and “woman” — and the headman tells
them the myth of the origin of the initiation. Long, long ago, a
Divine Being, Mungan-Ngaua, lived on earth. It was he who
civilized the Kumai. His son Tundum is the direct ancestor of the
Kumai. Mungan-Ngaua instituted the initiation mysteries and his
son conducted them for the first time, using the two bull-roarers
that bear his name and that of his wife. But a traitor revealed the
jeraeil mysteries to women. In his anger, Mungan-Ngaua brought
on a cosmic cataclysm in which almost the entire human race per-
ished, and soon after he ascended into the sky.^^ His son Tundum
and Tundum’s wife were turned into porpoises. While telling them

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS 11

this myth, the old men hand the bull-roarers to the neophytes and
tell them to whirl them.

After this mystery is revealed, all return to the camp. But the
teaching continues. The neophytes are especially instructed in the
duties of the adult. They also attend a number of dramatic repre-
sentations, illustrating the events of mythical times. The final rite
involves a fresh act of separation from the mother; she asks her
son for water to drink, but he “splashes water over her.” The
women then withdraw to their camp. Howitt saw a mother crying
for her son as if he were dead. As for the neophytes, they will
remain in the bush with their tutors for several more months.^®

The essence of this ceremony lies in the communication of the
name and myth of the Supreme Being, and the revelation of his
relation to the bull-roarers and to the initiation mystery The Kurnai
jeraeil involves no kind of operation or mutilation. Instead, the
initiation is confined to religious, moral, and social instruction. This
form of initiation has been seen as not only the simplest but also
the oldest in Australia.^^ And the absence of violent ordeals and
the peaceful nature of the ceremony in general is indeed striking.

Supreme Being and InitiatiomAmong the Yuin

With other Australian tribes, dramatic elements play a more
important role. For example, among the Yuin and the Murring,
after the novices have been separated from their mothers, the
ceremony continues as follows. The men whirl bull-roarers and
point with raised arms to the sky; this gesture signifies “the Great
Master” (biamban), the Supreme Being, whose real name — ^un-
known to the uninitiated and to women — is Daramulun. The in-
structors tell the novices the myths of Daramulun, and forbid them
ever to speak of these things before women or children. Soon after,
all set out in procession for the mountains.^^ At each halt magic
dances are performed. The medicine men cause their magical in-
fluence to enter the novices, thus making them pleasing to Dara-
mulun. When they are close to the mountains the guardians and
novices make a camp by themselves, while the other men prepare
a cleared ground in the forest. When this is ready, the novices are
brought to it by their tutors. As usual, they look at nothing but the
ground between their feet. When they are suddenly ordered to raise
their eyes, they see before them masked and disguised men, and to
one side, carved on a tree, the figure of Daramulun, three feet high.
Presently their guardians cover their eyes, the chief medicine man

12 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INIIIATION

approaches dancing, seizes the head of each novice in turn, and
knocks out one of his incisors with a chisel and a small hammer.
The boy is not allowed to spit blood, or else the wound will not
heal.

Usually the novices endure this ordeal with admirable indiffer-
ence. They are then led to the tree bearing the image of Daramulun,
and the great secret is revealed to them. Daramulun lives beyond
the sky, and from there watches what men are doing. It is he who
takes care of men after they die. It was he who instituted the initia-
tion ceremony and taught it to their ancestors. The medicine men
receive their powers from Daramulun. “He is the great Biamban
who can do anything and go anywhere, and he gave the tribal laws
to their fathers, who have handed them down from father to son
until now.”®* The medicine man warns the novices that he will kill
them if they reproduce the image of Daramulun in the main camp.
Each novice receives a “man’s belt” (“a long cord of opossum-fur
string”). After this, all return to the small camp at the edge of the
forest, where many dances and pantomimes, imitating the behavior
of various animals, are performed.

As Spencer and Gillen have pointed out in connection with the
Arunta, these dances and pantomimes have a deep religious mean-
ing, “for each performer represents an ancestral individual who
lived in the Alcheringa.”*® Hence there is a reactualization of
mythical events, which enables the new initiates to assimilate the
religious heritage of the tribe. The dances are continued until three
o’clock in the morning, and are resumed the next day. A final
pantomime symbolizes death and resurrection. A medicine man is
buried in a grave, and invocations are chanted to Daramulun. Sud-
denly the medicine man rises from his grave, with “magical sub-
stances” ijoias) in his mouth, substances that he claims to have
just received from Daramulun. At noon, the entire group bathe in
a stream. “Everything belonging to the bush work is washed away,
so that the women may not know anything about it.”®* The initiates
are now shown the bull-roarers, and then all return to the main
camp. Smeared with red ocher, the initiates now resemble the other
men. The women wait for them, each mother having “a band of
white clay across her face as a sign of mourning.”®® Afterward the
young initiates will live in the bush, eating only certain kinds of
small animals, for they are under a number of dietary prohibitions.
They will remain in Ae bush for six or seven months, under the
supervision of their tutors, who visit them from time to time.®®

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

13

In this long and varied initiation ceremony, certain features first
strike us. Particularly noticeable are the insistence upon secrecy
and above all the dramatic quality of the ritual. This is in the form
of a scenario with several principal moments: dances by the
medicine men and exhibition of their magical powers, dramatic
revelation of the name and myth of the Supreme Being, violent
extraction of the novice’s incisor. Daramulun has a role of the first
importance; the Divine Being is present both in the bull-roarers
and in the image carved in the tree. As for the pantomime of the
medicine man’s death and resurrection, it shows not only that
Daramulun himself resuscitates him, but also that he personally
receives the medicine man and gives him magical substances. No
other Australian puberty ceremony gives such a important role to
the Supreme Being. Everything to which the novice is subjected is
done in the name of Daramulun, and all the revelations concern his
acts and his powers.

Symbolism of Initiatory Death

The role of the Supreme Being is also of considerable importance
in the Wiradjuri initiation ceremonies.^^ When the novices have
been taken to the forest, they are instructed by their tutors and
witness the dances of the medicine men, who, daubed with ashes,
display their magical powers, exhibiting objects that they claim to
extract from their entrails. In one of the most spectacular perform-
ances, the chief medicine man disappears for a short time, then
returns clothed in branches and leaves, which he says that he has
gathered in Baiame’s camp. For the Wiradjuri, Daramulun is no
longer what he is for the Yuin, a Supreme Being, but the son or
servant of Baiame, the highest of the Gods. However, Daramulun
plays the principal role in the rite of extracting the incisor. Accord-
ing to Mathews’ description,^® the novices hre covered with blankets
and are told that Daramulun is coming to bum them. While the
tooth is being knocked out, the bull-roarer sounds. The blankets
are suddenly removed, and the tutors point to the bull-roarer, cry-
ing, “That is Daramulun!” The novices are allowed to touch the
buU-roarers, which are then destroyed or carefully burned. Accord-
ing to a myth summarized by Mathews,^® Daramulun told his
father, or master, Baiame, that during initiation he killed the boys,
cut them to pieces, burned them, and then restored them to life,
“new beings, but each with a tooth missing.” Other variants of the
myth make him swallow them, then disgorge them alive.

14 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

This extremely important initiatory motif — ^being swallowed
by a Divine Being or a monster — ^will occupy our attention later.
For the moment, I will add that other tribes too believe that Dara-
mulun kills and resuscitates the boys during their initiation. The
Wonghibon, a Wiradjuri subtribe, say that Thurmulun seizes the
novice, kills him, sometimes tears him to pieces, and then resus-
citates him with one tooth missing.^® Among the Turrbal, when
the bull-roarer is heard at night the women and children believe
that the medicine men are eating the novices.^^ In this example the
magicians are merged with the mythical Being incarnated in the
bull-roarer and institutor of the rite. According to Spencer and
Gillen, among the Unmatjera, the Kaitish, and the Binbinga of
the Gulf of Carpentaria region, the women and children are con-
vinced that the noise of the bull-roarers is the voice of a spirit who
eats the novices, or who kills and resuscitates them.-^^ por the
moment, let us note this connection between initiatory death at the
hands of a Divine Being and the sound of the bull-roarer. We shall
later see that this sound is the symbol of a divinity who bestows not
only death but also life, sexuality, and fertility.

To return to the Wiradjuri, Howitt, describing the period passed
in the forest, records a detail that is highly significant; the men cut
a spiral piece from the bark of a tree to symbolize the path between
sky and earth. In my opinion this represents a mystical reactivation
of the connections between the human world and the divine world
of the sky. According to the myths the first man, created by Baiame,
ascended to the sky by a path and conversed with his Creator.^^ The
role of the bark spiral in the initiation festival is thus clear — as
symbol of ascension it reinforces the connection with the sky world
of Baiame. We shall see that the symbol of ascent into the sky
occurs in other types of Australian initiations. To conclude our
description of the Wiradjuri ceremony, when the novices come back
to the main camp, their mothers treat them as strangers. They beat
them with branches; the novices flee to the bush, where this time
they will remain for almost a year. This is their definitive separa-
tion from their mothers. Under the supervision of their guardians,
they are subjected to numerous dietary taboos. They are forbidden
to go near the camp, to look at women, or to go to bed before “the
Milky Way is straight across the sky.”®^

Meaning of the Initiatory Ordeals

This last detail is important — ^the Wiradjuri novices must not go
to bed until late in the night. This is an initiatory ordeal that is

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS 15

documented more or less all over the world, even in comparatively
highly developed religions. Not to sleep is not only to conquer
physical fatigue, but is above all to show proof of will and spiritual
strength; to remain awake is to be conscious, present in the world,
responsible. Among the Yuri-ulu, the novices are constantly shaken
so that they cannot fall asleep.^® Among the Narriniyeri, the novices
are taken to the bush in the middle of the night, after which they
neither eat nor sleep for three days. And during the remainder of
their period of segregation, they are allowed to drink water only by
“sucking it through a reed.”^® This is certainly an extremely archaic
custom, for it is found among the initiation ceremonies of the
Fuegians.®"^ Its purpose is to accustom the boy to drinking very
little, just as the countless dietary prohibitions are intended to
prepare him for a hard life. All these ordeals involving physical
resistance®® — ^prohibitions against sleeping, drinking, and eating
during the first three or four days — are also found among the
Yamana of Tierra del Fuego®® and the Indian ‘tribes of western
California.'*® In all probability this shows that they belong to an
extremely archaic cultural stratum.

But dietary prohibitions also have a quite complex religious func-
tion, into which I shall not enter here. I will only observe that in
some tribes dietary prohibitions are successively removed as myths,
dances, and pantomimes teach the novice the religious origin of
each kind of food. There is also the ritual prohibition against
touching food with the fingers. Among the Ngarigo, for example,
during the six months that the novice spends in the bush his guard-
ian feeds him, putting the food into his mouth.^^ The inference
would seem to be that the novice is regarded as a newborn infant
and hence cannot feed himself without help. For, as we shall see
later, in some puberty ceremonies the novice is assimilated to a
baby unable to use its hands or to talk. But in other parts of the
world the prohibition against using the hands forces the novices
to take their food directly with their mouths, as most animals do
and as the souls of the dead are supposed to do. This is perfectly
understandable, for in their isolation in the bush the novices are
actually regarded as dead and are assimilated to ghosts. Let us
even now note the ambivalence in the symbolism of segregation in
the jungle; there is always the idea of a death to the profane condi-
tion, but this signifies transformation into a ghost, as well as the
beginning of a new life comparable to that of the infant.

The prohibition against speech is open to the same twofold in-
terpretation — as death, and as return to earliest infancy. The

16

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

neophyte is either dead, or scarcely bom — ^more precisely, he is
being bom. There is no need to cite examples — almost everywhere
in Australia the novices are enjoined to maintain silence. They
are allowed only to answer their tutors’ questions. Among some
tribes the initiands, lying on the ground — Whence symbolically dead
— ^are not even permitted to use words, but only sounds imitating the
cries of birds and animals. The Karadjeri novices make a special
soimd and then use gestures to indicate what they need.^^ The
various prohibitions against the use of sight are to be interpreted in
a similar way. The initiands are allowed to look only at the ground
between their feet, they always walk with their heads bent, or they
are covered with leaves and blankets, or are blindfolded. Darkness
is a symbol of the other world, whether the world of death or of the
fetal state. Whatever meaning we give to segregation in the bush —
whether we see it as a death or as a return to the prenatal condition
— ^it is clear that the novice is no longer in the profane world.

But all these prohibitions — ^fasting, silence, darkness, complete
suppression of sight or its restriction to the ground between the
novice’s feet — also constitute so many ascetic exercises. The novice
is forced to concentrate, to meditate. Hence the various physical
ordeals also have a spiritual meaning. The neophyte is at once
prepared for the responsibilities of adult life and progressively
awakened to the life of the spirit. For the ordeals and restrictions
are accompanied by instruction through myths, dances, panto-
mimes. The physical ordeals have a spiritual goal — ^to introduce the
youth into the tribal culture, to make him “open” to spiritual values.
Ethnologists have been stmck by the intense interest with which
novices listen to mythical traditions and take part in ceremonial
life. “The avidity,” Norman B. Tindale writes, “with which the
newly initiated youth enters into ceremonial life and the acquiring
of the hidden significance of the mythological traditions and prac-
tices of the tribe is remarkable.”^ Before or after circumcision the
novice, with his guardians, takes long journeys, following the route
of the mythical Beings; and during all this time, he must avoid
meeting human beings, especially women.^* In some cases the
novice is not allowed to speak, and he swings his bull-roarer to
warn away anyone who might be on the road.*® As the Musgrave
Ranges aborigines express it, the novice is a Wangarapa, “a boy in
hiding.”*®

Among Australian initiatory ordeals, “throwing fire over
the heads” of the novices and the “tossing” of novices are especially

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

17

noteworthy. The latter ceremony is found only among the Arunta,
for whom it is the first act in a very long initiation, which will con-
tinue for several years.^’’ Throwing fire is probably a purificatory
rite connected with lightning, but it also has a sexual meaning. As
for the tossing of the novices, the ritual can be interpreted in two
ways — as offering the novice to the Sky God or as a symbol of
ascension. But the two meanings are complementary; boffi involve
the presentation of the novice to the Sky Being. This ceremony is,
I think, of the same nature as other ascension rites found in initiation
ceremonies. During the Umba ceremony, for example, the novice
has to climb a young tree that has been stripped of its branches.
When he gets to the top of it, all those on the ground burst into
cheers.^® Among the Kurnai, just before the return to the camp,
what is called the “opossum game” is played. A tree about twenty
feet high is stripped of its branches and fashioned into a pole; one
after the other, the instructors climb it, imitating the climbing
technique of the opossum;^® but this explanation is probably
secondary. A similar custom is found among the Wiradjuri.®®
Among the Karadjeri, the tree climbing constitutes a special initia-
tory ceremony, called laribuga; in the forest, the neophyte climbs
a tree while the men chant a sacred song.

Piddington says that the subject of the song is connected with a
myth of the tree, but that the Karadjeri have forgotten its meaning.®^
Yet the meaning of the ritual can be divined: the tree symbolizes
the axis of the cosmos, the World Tree; by climbing it, the neophyte
reaches the sky. Probably, then, we here have an ascension, such as
those that the medicine men accomplish, often in connection with
initiation ceremonies. An example occurs in the bora performed by
the Chepara. A young tree is fixed in the ground, roots up; around
it are set several trees that have been stripped of their bark, painted
with ocher, and tied together with bark bands. A medicine man
sits on top of the inverted tree, with a cord hanging from his
mouth. He claims to represent the Supreme Being, Maamba. The
tribesmen believe that during the night he goes up to the sky to see
Maamba and talk with him about the tribe’s affairs. The medicine
men show the novices a quartz crystal and tell them that they re-
ceived it from Maamba and that anyone who swallows a piece of
it will be able to fly to the sky.®^

To climb into the sky by the aid of a tree, to fly by the virtue of
a quartz crystal, are specifically shamanic motifs, quite frequent
in Australia, but also found elsewhere.®^ They will be examined

18

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

in greater detail when we come to shamanic initiations (Chapter
V). For the moment, I would observe that the symbolism of ascen-
sion, as we see it in the rites of tossing and tree climbing, dominates
some Australian puberty ceremonies. Two conclusions seem to me
to follow from this. First, Supreme Beings of the sky must in the
past have played a role of considerable importance in these cere-
monies; for rites of ascension are archaic and, in oui day, as we
just saw, their originai meaning has become obscured if not entirely
lost. Secondly, the medicine men obtsiin their magical powers from
Beings of the sky, they often represent them in the ceremonies, and
it is the medicine men who reveal to the novices the traditions of
these divine Beings who have now withdrawn to the sky. In other
words, the symbols of ascent found in puberty rites woidd seem to
indicate that in earlier periods there was a closer relation between
the Gods of the sky and initiation ceremonies.

Initiation and Collective Regeneration

The tribes that have so far provided our examples of puberty
rites perform no initiatory operation except the extraction of an
incisor. But in a considerable part of Australia, the specific tribal
rite is circumcision, usually followed by another operation, subin-
cision. Other initiatory mutilations are also documented in Australia
— tattooing, tearing out the hair, scarring the skin of the back. Since
circumcision and subincision are fraught with quite complex mean-
ings and imply the revelation of the religious values of blood and
sexuality, I shall take them up in the next chapter, in which, in
general, 1 shall continue the description of puberty rites, presenting
examples taken from other primitive religions, and emphasizing the
symbolism of mystical rebirth.

For, in-order not to overcomplicate this first chapter, I have here
chiefly stressed the symbolism of death. It was important to make
it clear that puberty rites, precisely because they bring about the
neophyte’s introduction into the realm of the sacred, imply death to
the profane condition, that is, death to childhood. But we have seen
that this initiatory death of the boys is at the same time the occasion
for an intertribal festival that regenerates the collective religious life.

Hence Australian initiations are episodes in a cosmic mystery.
Initiates and novices leave behind tiie familiar landscape of the
common camp and, on the sacred ground or in the bush, relive
the primordial events, the mythical history of the tribe. Reactualiz-
ing the myths of origin implies, as we saw, participation in the

INITIATION MYSTERIES IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

19

Dream Times, in the Time sanctified by the mystical presence of
the Divine Beings and the Ancestors. For our purpose, it is not
important that the Supreme Beings of the sky do not everywhere
play the leading role in initiation ceremonies; nor, as we shall see
in greater detail in the next chapter, that among some peoples this
role falls to the Ancestors or to other mythical figures, some of
them with a demonic aspect. To me, it seems extremely important
that, whatever the identity of these Superhuman Beings may be,
for the respective tribes they represent the world of transcendent
and sacred realities. Equally important is the fact that the collective
initiation ceremonies reactualize the mythical times in which these
Divine Beings were creating or organizing the earth; in other
words, initiation is considered to be performed by these Divine
Beings or in their presence. Hence the mystical death of the novices
is not something negative. On the contrary, their death to child-
hood, to asexuality, to ignorance — in short, to the profane condition
— is the occasion for a total regeneration of the cosmos and the
collectivity. Because their gestures are repeated, the Gods, the
civilizing Heroes, the mythical Ancestors, are again present and
active on earth. The mystical death of the boys and their awakening
in the community of initiated men thus form part of a grandiose
reiteration of the cosmogony, of the anthropogony, and of all the
creations that were characteristic of the primordial epoch, the
Dream Times. Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the
world. And through this recapitulation, the whole world is sancti-
fied anew. The boys die to their profane condition and are resus-
citated in a new world; for, through the revelation they have
received during their initiation, they can perceive the world as a
sacred work, a creation of the Gods.

Let us mark and remember this fact, which is as it were a funda-
mental motif, documented in every kind of initiation: the experience
of initiatory death and resurrection not only basically changes the
neophyte’s fundamental mode of being, but at the same time reveals
to him the sacredness of human life and of the world, by revealing
to him the great mystery, common to all religions, that men, with
the cosmos, with all forms of life, are the creation of the Gods or
of Superhuman Beings. This revelation is conveyed by the origin
myths. Learning how things came into existence, the novice at the
same time learns that he is the creation of Another, the result of
such-and-such a primordial event, the consequence of a series of

20

BIRTH AND REBIRTH

mythological occurrences, in short, of a sacred history. This dis-
covery that man is part and parcel of a sacred history which can be
communicated only to initiates constitutes the point of departure
for a long-continued flowering of religious forms.

CHAPTER II

The Initiatory Ordeals
tV!

The Bull-Roarer and Circumcision

In the parts of Australia where the extraction of an incisor is not
practiced, puberty initiations usually include circumcision, followed,
after some time, by another operation, subincision/ Some ethnolo-
gists regard Austrian circumcision as a recent cultural phenome-
non.2 According to Wilhelm Schmidt, the custom was brought to
Australia by a cultural wave from New Guinea.® Whatever the case
may be as to its origin, circumcision is the outstanding puberty rite
not only throughout Oceania but in Africa too, and it is also docu-
mented among some peoples of both North and South America.®
As an initiatory rite of puberty, circumcision is extremely wide-
spread, we might also say universal. The problem does not demand
our attention in all its complexity. I shall of necessity confine myself
to one or two aspects of it, especially to the relations between the
rite of circumcision and the revelation of religious realities.

The first aspect that strikes us, in Australia as elsewhere, is the
fact that circumcision is believed to be performed npt by men but
by divine or “demonic” Beings. Here we have not merely the repeti-
tion of an act instituted by the Gods or by civilizing Heroes in
mythical times; we have the active presence of these Superhuman
Beings themselves during the initiation. Among the Arunta, when
the women and children hear the bull-roarers, they believe that they
are hearing the voice of the Great Spirit Twanyirrika, come to take
the boys. And when the boys are circumcised, they are given bull-
roarers ichuringas)? Hence it is the Great Spirit himself who is

21

22

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INUIATION

supposed to perform the operation. According to Strehlow^ the
Aimnta imagine that the ceremony takes place in the following way.
The novice is led before Tuanjiraka, who says to him, “Look at
the stars!” When the boy looks up, the Great Spirit cuts off his
head. He gives it back to him the next day, when the head begins
to decompose, ahd resuscitates him.® Among the Pitjandara, a
man comes rushing out of the forest with a “broken flint,” circum-
cises the novices, and immediately disappears.'^ Among the Karad-
jeri, the novice is circumcised in a sitting position, his eyes
blindfolded and his ears stopped up; immediately after the opera-
tion, he is shown the bull-roarers, and — after the blood of his
wound has dried — the flint instruments with which the operation
was performed.® The Kukata perform the circumcision while the
bull-roarers are whirled and after the women and children have
fled in terror.® The Anula women think that the noise of the bull-
roarers is the voice of the Great Spirit Gnabaia, who swallows the
novices and later disgorges them as initiates.^®

There is no need to multiply examples.^^ To sum up, circumcision
appears as a sacred act, performed in the name of Gods or of Super-
human Beings incarnated in, or represented by, the operators and
their ritual tools. The whirling of the bull-roarers before or during
circumcision expresses the presence of the Divine Beings. It was
stated that among the Yuin, the Kurnai, and the other tribes of
southeastern Australia, where circumcision is not practiced, the
central mystery of the initiation includes, among other things, the
revelation of the bull-roarer as the instrument or the voice of the
Sky God or of his son or servant. This identification of the noise of
the bull-roarer with the voice of the God is an extremely old re-
ligious idea; we find it among the Indian tribes of California and
among the Ituri pygmies, that is, in regions that the historico-cul-
tural school regards as belonging to the earliest culture ( Urkultur)
As for the complementary idea that the sound of the bull-roarer
represents thunder, it is even more widespread, since it is docu-
mented among many peoples in Oceania, Africa, and the two Amer-
icas, and also in ancient Greece, where the rhombos was held to
be the “thunder of Zagreus.”^® Hence it is highly probable that in
the theology and mythology of the bull-roarer we have one of man-
kind’s oldest religious conceptions. The fact that in southeastern
Australia bull-roarers are present at initiations performed under
the sign of the Supreme Being of the sky is yet another proof of
the archaism of this form of initiation.^^

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

23

But we have just seen that in the Australian circumcision cere-
monies the bull-roarer signifies the presence of the superhuman
Being who performs the operation. And since circumcision is
equivalent to a mystical death, the novice is believed to be killed
by this Superhuman Being. The structure of these masters of
initiation quite clearly shows that they no longer belong to the
class of the Supreme Sky Beings of southeastern Australia; they are,
moreover, regarded as either sons or servants of the Supreme
Beings, or as the mythical Ancestors of the tribes, sometimes
appearing in animal form. We see, then, that in Australia the
initiatory rite of circumcision has its place in a mythology that is
more complex, more dramatic, and presumably more recent than
the mythologies of the forms of initiation in which there is no
circumcision. Particularly striking is the terrifying nature of these
masters of initiation, who manifest their presence by the sound
of the bull-roarers. A similar situation is found outside of Aus-
tralia: the Divine Beings who play a part in initation ceremonies are
usually imagined in the form of beasts of prey — lions and leopards
(initiatory animals par excellence) in Africa, jaguars in South
America, crocodiles and marine monsters in Oceania. From the
historico-cultural point of view, the connection between the animal
masters of initiation and the bull-roarer would prove that this type
of initiation is the creation of the archaic hunter culture.^® This
comes out quite clearly in African initiation ceremonies; here too
circumcision is equivalent to death, and the operators are dressed
in lion skins and leopard skins; they incarnate the divinities in
animal form who in mythical times first performed initiatory mur-
der. The operators wear the claws of beasts of prey and their
knives are barbed. They attack the novices’ genital organs, which
shows that the intention is to kill them. The act of circumcision
symbolizes the destruction of the genital organs by the animal
master of the initiation. The operators are sometimes called lions
and circumcision is expressed by the verb “to kill.” But soon
afterward the novices are themselves dressed in leopard or lion
skins; that is, they assimilate the divine essence of the initiatory
animal and hence are restored to life in it.^®

From this pattern of African initiation by circumcision, certain
elements emerge which we shall do well to note and remember.
First, the masters of initiation are divinities in animal form, which
supports the hypothesis that, structurally, the ritual belongs to an
archaic hunter culture. Second, the divine beasts of prey are incar-

24

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF mUIATION

nated by the operators, who “kill” the novices by circumcising them.
Third, this initiatory murder is justified by an origin myth, which
tells of a primordial Animal who killed human beings in order to
resuscitate them; in the end, the Animal was itself killed, and this
event, which took place in the beginning, is ritually reiterated by
the circumcision of the novices. Fourth, “killed” by the beast of
prey, the novice is nevertheless resuscitated by putting on its skin,
which -means that in the end he becomes both the victim and the
murderer; in short, the initiation is equivalent to the revelation of
this mythical event — a revelation that enables the novice to share
in the twofold nature of the human victim of the primordial Animal,
and of the same Animal as, in its turn, the victim of other divine
figures.^^ Hence, in Africa too, circumcision is believed to be
performed by a primordial Being, incarnated by the operator, and
represents the ritual reiteration of a mythical event.

All these data concerning the ritual function of the bull-roarers,
circumcision, and the Supernatural Beings who are believed to
perform the initiation indicate the existence of a mythico-ritual
theme whose essential features can be summarized as follows: (1)
mythical Beings, identified with or manifesting themselves through
the bull-roarers, kill, eat, swallow, or bum the novice; (2) they
resuscitate him, but changed — in short, a new man; (3) these
Beings also manifest themselves in animal form or are closely
connected with an animal mythology; (4) their fate is, in essence,
identical with that of the initiates,^® for when they lived on earth,
they too were killed and resuscitated, but by their resurrection they
established a new mode of existence. This entire mythico-ritual
theme is of primary importance for an understanding of the
phenomena of initiation, and we shall constantly encoimter it in
the course of our investigation.

The suffering consequent upon circumcision — sometimes an
extremely painM operation — ^is an expression of initiatory death.
However, it must be emphasized that the real terror is reli^ous
in nature; it arises from the fear of being killed by Divine Beings.
But it is always the Divine Being who resuscitates the novices; and
then they do not go back to their childhood life, but share in a
higher existence — ^higher because it is open to knowledge, to the
sacred, and to sexuality. The relations between initiation and sexual
maturity ate obvious. The uninitiated are assimilated to infants and
young girls, and hence are supposed to be unable to conceive, or,
among some peoples, their children are not accepted into the dan.^*

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

25

Among the Magwanda and Bapedi peoples of Africa the master of
the initiation addresses the novices in these words: “Until now, you
have been in the darkness of childhood; you were like women and
you knew nothingl’’^^ Very often, especially in Africa and Oceania,
the young initiates are allowed great sexual freedom after they have
been circumcised.^^ But we must beware of misinterpreting these
licentious excesses, for what is in question here is not sexual
freedom, in the modern, desacralized sense of the term. In premod-
ern societies, sexuality, like all the other functions of life, is fraught
with sacredness. It is a way of participating in the fundamental mys-
tery of life and fertility. Through his initiation, the novice has gained
access to the sacred; he now knows that the world, life, and fertility
are sacred realities, for they are the work of Divine Beings. Hence,
for the novice, his introduction to sexual life is equivalent to sharing
in the sacredness of the world and of human life.

Symbolism of Subincision

In Australia, as we saw, circumcision is followed by subincision.
The interval between the two operations varies, from five or six
weeks among the Arunta to two or three years among the Karad-
jeri. For the ethnologist and the psychologist, this mysterious opera-
tion raises a number of problems. There is no need to go into them
here; I will confine myself to two of the religious meanings of sub-
incision. The first is the idea of bisexuality. The second is the reli-
gious value of blood. According to Winthuis, the purpose of sub-
incision is symbolically to give the neophyte a female sex organ,
so that he will resemble the divinities, who, Winthuis asserts, are
always bisexual.^^ gj-gt thing to be said in this connection is
that divine bisexuality is not documented in the oldest Australian
cultural strata, for it is precisely in these archaic cultures that the
gods are called Fathers. Nor is divine bisexuality found in other
really primitive religions. The concept of divine bisexuality appears
to be comparatively recent; in Australia, it was probably intro-
duced by cultural waves from Melanesia and Indonesia.^®

However, there is an element of truth in Winthuis" hypothesis,
and that is the idea of divine totality. This idea, which is found in a
number of primitive religions, naturally implies the coexistence of
all the divine attributes, and hence also the coalescence of sexes.^^

As to the symbolic transformation of the initiand into a woman
by means of subincision, only a few clear cases of this have been
found in Australia. W. E. Roth, for example, observed that the

26

RIUBS AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATTON

Pitta-Pitta and the Boubia of nordtwest central Queensland assimi-
late the wound from subincision to the vulva, and also refer to the
novice on whom the operation has recently been performed as “one
with a vulva.”*® R. M. Bemdt, studying the Kunapipi cult in north-
ern Australia, gives the same interpretation: “Symbolically, then,”
he writes, “the subincised member represents both the female and
the male organs, essential in the process of fructification.”*® It
should be added that in this last example we probably have a more
recent idea, brought to Australia with the waves of Melanesian cul-
ture, for the great majority of Australian tribes are ignorant that
there is a causal relation between the sexual act and conception.*’’

It will help us to understand these Australian data if we remem-
ber that the novice’s ritual transformation into a woman during
his initiation is a rather common phenomenon in other cultural
areas. In Africa, for example, among the Masai, the Nandi, the
Nuba, and other tribes, the novices are dressed as girls; while
among the South African Sotho, girls who are being initiated
wear men’s clothing.*® Similarly the novices to be initiated into the
Arioi Society in Tahiti are dressed as women.*® According to
Wilhelm Schmidt®® and Paul Wirz,®’ ritual transformation into
women is practiced in New Guinea. And Haddon has found it in
Torres Strait.®* Even the quite widespread custom of ritual nudity
during the period of segregation in the bush can be interpreted as
symbolizing the novice’s asexuality. I suggest that the religious
meaning of all these customs is this: the novice has a better chance
of attaining to a particular mode of being — ^for example, becoming
a man, a, woman — if he first symbolically becomes a totality. For
mythical thought, a particular mode of being is necessarily pre-
ceded by a toted mode of being. The androgyne is considered
superior to the two sexes just because it incarnates totality and
hence perfection. For this reason we are justified in interpreting
the ritual transformation of novices into women — ^whether by
assuming women’s dress or by subincision — as the desire to recover
a primordial situation of totality and perfection.

But in Australia and the nearby regions, the primary purpose of
initiatory subincision appears to be obtaining fresh blood. Through-
out the world, blood is a symbol of strength and fertility. In Aus-
tralia as elsewhere, the novices are daubed with red ocher — a sub-
stitute for blood — or sprinkled with fresh blood. Among the
Dieiri, for example, the men open veins and let the blood flow
over the novices’ bodies to make them brave.®® Among the Karad-

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

27

jeri, the Itchumundi, and other Australian tribes, the novice also
dri^s blood;^^ and the same custom is found in New Guinea,
where the explanation given for it is that the novice has to be
strengthened with male blood because the blood he has had so far
was entirely his mother’s.^®

In this last example we have to do with two different but con-
nected ideas. First, since the fetus is fed on its mother’s blood, all
its blood is female. Hence, secondly, the initiation, which defini-
tively separates the boy from his mother, must supply him with
male blood. In northeastern New Guinea, where the initiatory
operation of subincision has been replaced by incision of the sexual
organ, the novices are told that this is a way of getting rid of their
mother’s blood, so that they will grow strong and handsome.^®
Among the Vangla-Papua of the Bismarck Archipelago, the
maternal blood is removed by perforating the nose,^^ an operation
that symbolically corresponds to mutilating the genitals. The same
custom is found among the Kuman of New Guinea, where the
chief initiatory operation consists in perforating “the inner septum
of the [candidate’s] nose.” As a native explained to John Nilles:
“This is done to release the bad blood accumulated since he was
in his mother’s womb, his inheritance from the woman.”^®

M. F. Ashley-Montagu thinks that such beliefs are the explana-
tion for subincision.®® In his view, men had observed that women
get rid of “bad blood” by menstruation, and tried to imitate them
by inflicting a genital wound that made the male genital organ
resemble the female. If this is so, we have here not merely the
idea of expelling the mother’s blood, but especially the wish to
regenerate the blood by periodically eliminating it after the manner
of women. Subincision makes it possible for men to obtain a certain
quantity of blood by periodically opening their wounds. This is
done especially at critical times, and also in connection with
initiations.^®

The phenomenon of subincision is too complex to be adequately
discussed in a few pages. For our purpose, one fact is of primary
interest. The novice is initiated into the mystery of blood — ^that
is, his instructors reveal to him the connections (both mystical and
physiological) which still bind him to his mother, and the ritual
which will enable him to transform himself into a man. Since
female blood is the product of female feeding, the novice, as we
saw, is subjected to numerous dietary prohibitions. The mystical
interconnection between food, blood, and sexuality constitutes

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

28

an initiatory pattern that is specifically Melanesian and Indo-
nesian/^ but which is also found elsewhere. What we should note
is the fact that the novice is radically regenerated as the result
of these sanguinary mutilations. In short, all these operations find
their explanation and justification on the religious plane, for the
idea of regeneration is a religious idea. Hence we must guard
against being misled by the aberrant aspect of some initiatory
mutiliations or tortures. We must not forget that, on the level both
of primitive and of more developed cultures, the strange and the
monstrous are expressions frequently used to emphasize the
transcendence of the spiritual.

Initiation in Tierra del Fuego

Access to spiritual life, seen as the first result of initiation, is
proclaimed by many symbols of regeneration and new birth. A fre-
quent custom is that of giving the novice a new name immediately
after his initiation. In addition to being widespread, it is archaic,
for we find it among the tribes of southeastern Australia.'*^ Now for
all premodern societies the individual’s name is equivalent to his
true existence, to his existence as a spiritual being. It is interesting
to note that the initiatory symbolism of new birth is documented
even among very primitive peoples, for example, the Yamana and
the Halakwulup of Tierra del Fuego, whose puberty rites are simple
in the extreme. For, according to the investigations of Gusinde and
W. Koppers, the Yamana and the Halakwulup initiation is rather
a course of moral, social, and religious instruction than a secret
ceremony involving more or less dramatic ordeals. The girls are
initiated with the boys, although each sex also receives separate
teaching from old men and women. Among the Halakwulup there
is no initiatory secrecy. Schmidt considers this collective initiation
of the two sexes to be the most ancient of existing forms, and
stresses the fact that it involves no corporal mutilation, being prin-
cipally confined to instruction regarding the nature and activities
of the Supreme Being.^^ He further holds that the Yamana and
the Halakwulup initiation represents an even older form than the
initiation ceremony of the Australian Kurnai, giving as his reason
the fact that the Fuegians do not practice separation of the sexes.^*

Whether this chronology is correct, and whether the extreme
simplicity of the Yamana and the Halakwulup initiation reflects a
primitive state or, on the other hand, an impoverishment of rites,
are questions that need not be decided here. But it is significant
that among these Fuegian tribes we find a perfectly clear and con-

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

29

sistent initiatory pattern, which already includes the motifs of seg-
regation, mystical death and resurrection, and revelation of the
Supreme Beings. The initiation is performed at a great distance
from the village; the one that Gusinde and Koppers attended in
1922 took place “in a lonely spot on the Island of Navarino.”*®
The novices are taken from their parents — above all, from their
mothers — ^whose guardianship is replaced by that of their “spon-
sors.” They are subjected to a physical and moral discipline in which
it is easy to recognize the structure of initiatory ordeals — for exam-
ple, they must fast, maintain a particular body posture, speak little
and in a low voice, fix their eyes on the ground, and, above all,
keep long vigils. That the Yamana regard their initiation as a
rebirth is shown by the fact that Koppers, when he attended the
ceremony, was given a new name to indicate that he was reborn
into the tribe.^® According to the information collected by Gusinde,
the Yamana initiation includes a certain number of esoteric
moments. The boys are segregated in a cabin, and an evil spirit,
the Earth Spirit Yetaita, plays an important role. He is believed to
eat men. During the ceremony Yetaita is represented by one of the
instructors, painted red and white. Springing from behind the
curtain, he attacks the novices, e.g., maltreats them, throws them
up into the air.^*^ The instructors enjoin the strictest secrecy con-
cerning the appearance and actions of Yetaita and in general con-
cerning everything that takes place in the cabin. It is true that
during the initiation period the instructors continually refer to the
Supreme Being, Watauineiwa, who is also believed to have estab-
lished the ceremony; but, ritually speaking, Yetaita’s role is the
more dramatic. Quite often these two supernatural figures are
regarded as equal in power. We may suppose that before becoming
the Earth Spirit {Erdgeist) he is today, Yetaita was the tribe’s myth-
ical Ancestor'^® — hence the initiatory master par excellence — and
that he acquired his aggressive character from the men’s secret
festivals of the Selknam.

For among the Selknam the puberty initiation was long ago
transformed into a secret ceremony reserved exclusively for men.**®
An origin myth tells that in the beginning — ^under the leadership
of Kra, Moon Woman and powerful sorceress — ^women terrorized
men because they knew how to change themselves into “spirits”;
that is, knew the arts of making and using masks. But one day
Kran, the Sun Man, discovered the women’s secret and told it to
the men. Infuriated, they killed all the women except little girls,
and since then they have organized secret ceremonies, with masks

30

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

and dramatic rituals, to terrorize the women in their turn. This
festival continues for from four to six months, and during the
ceremonies the evil female spirit, Xalpen, tortures the initiates
and “kills” them; but another spirit, Olim, a great medicine man,
resuscitates them.®® Hence in Tierra del Fuego, as in Australia,
puberty rites tend to become increasingly dramatic and especially
to intensify the terrifying nature of the scenarios of initiatory death.
But the dramatic elaboration of rituals and the introduction of
striking and even sensational mythologies do not occur in the name
of the Supreme Beings. On the contrary, these innovations result
in lessening the importance of the Supreme Beings, and even in
almost completely eliminating their active presence in the cult.
Their place is taken by demonic Beings and, in general, by mythical
figures that are in some way connected with a terrible but decisive
moment in the history of humanity. These Beings revealed certain
sacred mysteries or certain patterns of social behavior which
radically dtered men’s mode of existence and, consequently, their
religious and social institutions. Although supernatural, in the time
of beginnings these mythical Beings lived a life in some sort com-
parable to the life of men; more precisely, they experienced tension,
conflicts, drama, aggression, suffering, and, generally, death — and
by living all this for the first time on earth, they instituted man-
kind’s present way of being. Initiation reveals these primordial ad-
ventures to the novices, and they ritually reactualize the most
dramatic moments in the mythology of the Supernatural Beings.

This phenomenon becomes more marked when we leave the
extreme regions of the inhabited world — ^Australia, Tierra del
Fuego — and study the religions of Melanesia, Africa, and North
America. The rites become more complex and various; the or-
deals more sensational; physical suffering rises to the horrors of
torture; the mystical death is suggested by a ritual aggressiveness
when the novice is separated from his mo&er. Among the Hotten-
tots, for example, the initiate is allowed to insult and even to man-
handle his mother,®^ in token of his emancipation from her tutelage.
In some parts of Papua the novice walks over his mother’s body,
deliberately stepping on her belly,®® and this gesture confirms his
definitive separation from her.

Scenarios of Initiatory Death

The rites of initiatory death grow longer and more complex,
sometimes becoming real dramatic scenarios. In the Congo and

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

31

on the Loango coast, the boys between ten and twelve years old
drink a potion that makes them unconscious. They are then
carried into the jungle and circumcised. Bastian reports that they
are buried in the fetish house, and that when they wake they seem
to have forgotten their past life. During their seclusion in the
jungle they are painted white (certainly a sign that they have be-
come ghosts), they are allowed to steal, are taught the tribal
traditions, and learn a new language.®^

Characteristic here are death symbolized by loss of conscious-
ness, by circumcision, and by burial; forgetting the past; assimila-
tion of the novices to ghosts; learning a new language. Each of
these motifs recurs in numerous puberty rites of Africa, Oceania,
and North America. As it is impossible to cite them all, I shall
confine myself for the moment to a few examples of forgetting
the past after initiation. In Liberia, when the novices — ^who are
supposed to have been killed by the Forest Spirit — are resuscitated
to a new life, tattooed, and given a new name, they seem to have en-
tirely forgotten their past existence. They recognize neither their
families nor their friends, they do not even remember their own
names, and they behave as if they had forgotten how to perform
even the most elementary acts — ^washing themselves, for example.®^
Similarly, initiates into some Sudanese secret societies forget their
language.®® Among the Makua the novices spend several months
in a hut far from the village and are given new names; when they
return to the village they have forgotten their family relationships.
As Karl Weule puts it: by his stay in the bush, the son is dead in
his mother’s eyes.®® Forgetting is a symbol of death, but it can also
be interpreted as betokening earliest infancy. Among the Patasiva
of western Ceram, for example, the women are shown the bloody
lances with which the spirit is supposed to have killed the novices.
When the novices come back to the village, they behave like infants
— they do not speak, and pick things up by the wrong end.®^ What-
ever may be said of their sincerity, Aese attitudes and types of
behavior have a definite purpose — ^they proclaim to the whole com-
munity that the novices are new beings.

The dramatic structure of certain puberty rites comes out more
clearly in cases where we have detailed and accurate descriptions.
A good example is the Pangwe, whose initiatory rites are the sub-
ject of an excellent study by Gunther Tessmann. Four days before
the ceremony the novices are marked, and the mark is called "'con-
secration to death.” On the day of the festival they are given a

32

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

nauseating potion to drink, and any novice who vomits it up is
chased through the village with cries of “You must die!” The
novices are then taken to a house full of ants’ nests, and are made
to remain inside it for some time, during which they are badly
bitten; meanwhile their guardians cry, “You will be kUled, now
you must die!” The tutors then lead the novices to “death” in a
cabin in the jungle, where, for a whole month, they will live com-
pletely naked and in absolute solitude. They use a xylophone to
announce their presence, so that no one will have the bad luck to
meet them. At the end of the month they are painted white and
are allowed to return to the village to take part in the dances, but
they must sleep in the cabin in the bush. They are forbidden to let
women see them eat because, Tessmann writes, “of course the
dead do not eat.” They remain in the bush for three months. Among
the southern Pangwe, the ceremony is even more dramatic. An
excavation representing the grave is covered by a clay figure,
usually in the form of a mask. The excavation symbolizes the belly
of the cult divinity, and the novices pass over it, thus indicating
their new birth.®®

Here we have a well developed scenario, comprising several
moments: consecration to death; initiatory torture; death itself,
symbolized by segregation in the bush and ritual nudity; imitation
of the behavior of ghosts, for the novices are considered to be in
the other world and are assimilated to the dead; finally, the ritual of
rebirth and the return to the village. Probably a considerable
number of African and other peoples still have scenarios as elab-
orate as that of the Pangwe, even in our day. But explorers, espe-
cially those of the nineteenth century, have not always recorded
the details of these ceremonies. Generally they say no more than
that they encountered a death and resurrection ritual.

But we find a number of other African ceremonies in which
the dramatic element is of primary importance. Here, for example,
is what Torday and Joyce tell us about the Bushongo puberty rites.
A long ditch is dug, in which there are four niches. Four men hide
in these, disguised respectively as a leopard, a warrior, a smith,
and a monkey. The novices are made to walk through the ditch;
at a certain moment they fall into a pool of water. Another cere-
mony, Ganda, is still more terrifying. A man disappears into a
tunnel and shakes several poles whose tops can be seen from a
great distance. The novices believe that he has been attacked by
spirits in the tunnel and is fighting for his life. After secretly

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

33

rubbing his body with goat’s blood, the man comes out of the
tunnel as if he were severely wounded and exhausted. He coUapses
on the ground, and the other men immediately carry him far away
from the spot. The novices are then ordered to enter the tunnel,
one after the other. But in the greatest terror, they usually beg to
be let off. Niyami — the king, who is at the same time the master of
the initiation — consents, in return for the payment of a certain
sum.®*^

We here have a terrifying scenario, which tests the novices’
courage. This Bushongo puberty rite has very probably been
influenced by the initiation ceremonies of the secret societies
that are so important in Africa. We can suspect such an influence
whenever we find puberty initiations that are dramatic in character
and make use of masks. This is the case, for example, with the
Elema of New Guinea. Here, when the boys have reached the age
of ten or thereabouts, they are isolated in the Men’s House {eravo)
and the village is invaded by masked men, the heralds of Kovave,
God of the Mountain.®^ Swinging bull-roarers by night, the masked
men literally terrorize the village; they have the right to kill any
woman or noninitiate who tries to discover their identity. Mean-
while, the other men store up great quantities of food, especially
swine’s flesh, and when Kovave makes his appearance all withdraw
to the bush. One night the novices are brought into Kovave’s
presence. They hear a voice in the darkness, revealing the secret
lore and threatening death to any who should betray it. They are
then taken to cabins and put under dietary taboos. They are for-
bidden any relations with women. On the rare occasions when they
leave their cabins, they are not allowed to speak.®^ Their initiation
comprises several degrees — which in New Guinea is already an
indication of the influence of the secret societies. The atmosphere in
which these puberty rituals are performed, with the sudden appear-
ance of the masks and the terror of the women and the uninitiated,
suggests the tension that is characteristic of Melanesian secret
societies.

A fine example of the puberty rite developed into a dramatic
scenario is the Nanda ceremony, which used to be performed in
some parts of Fiji. The ritual began with the construction of a
stone enclosure, sometimes a hundred feet long and fifty wide, at
a great distance from the village. The stone wall might reach a
height of three feet. The structure was called Nanda, literally
“bed.”®2 por our purpose, some aspects of the ceremony can be

34

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

neglected — ^for example, its relations to Megalithic culture, and its
origin myth, according to which the Nanda was taught to the An-
cestors by two strangers, black in aspect and small in stature, whose
faces were respectively painted red and white. The Nanda ob-
viously represents the sacred ground. Two years pass between its
building and the first initiation, and two more years between the
latter and the second ceremony, after which Ae neophytes ate
finally considered to be men. Some time before the second cere-
mony^ large quantities of food are stored up and cabins are built
near the Nanda.

On a particular day the novices, led by a priest, proceed to the
Nanda in single file, with a club in one hand and a lance in the
other. The old men await them in front of the walls, singing. The
novices drop their weapons at the old man’s feet, as symbols of
gifts, and then withdraw to the cabins. On the fifth day, again led
by the priests, they once more proceed to the sacred enclosure,
but this time the old men are not awaiting them by the walls. They
are then taken into the Nanda. There “lie a row of dead men,
covered with blood, their bodies apparently cut open and their
entrails protruding.” The priest-guide walks over the corpses and
the terrified novices follow him to the other end of the enclosure,
where the chief priest awaits them. “Suddenly he blurts out a great
yell, whereupon the dead men start to their feet, and run down to
the river to cleanse themselves from the blood and filth with which
they are besmeared.”*®

The men represent the Ancestors, resuscitated by the mysterious
power of the secret cult, a power Erected by the high priest but
shared by all other initiates. The purpose of this scenario is not
merely to terrify the novices but also to show them that the mystery
of death and resurrection is enacted in the sacred enclosure. For
what the chief priest reveals to them is the secrets by whose
power death will always be followed by resurrection.

This example well illustrates the important role that the An-
cestors finally come to play in puberty ceremonies. What we have
here is, in short, a periodic return of Ae dead among the living for
the purpose of initiating the youth. This mythico-religious theme is
abundantly documented elsewhere, for example, in protohistorical
Japan and among the ancient Germans.** The important thing for
our purpose is that the idea of death and resurrection, which is
fundamental in all forms of initiation, here receives a new addi-
tion — ^the idea that death is never final, for the dead return. As

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS 35

we shall see later, this idea is destined to play an essential role in
secret societies.

Being Swallowed by a Monster

The strong emotions, the fear, the terror, so skillfully aroused by
the scenarios just described, are to be regarded as so mapy
initiatory tortures. We have already noticed some examples of
cruel ordeals; naturally, they are far greater in number and
variety. In southeastern Africa, the tutors beat the novices
mercilessly, and the novices must show no signs of pain.®® Excesses
of this kind sometimes result in the death of the boy. In such cases
the mother is not informed until after the period of segregation in
the bush;®® she is then told that her son was killed by the spirit,®’'
or that, swallowed by a monster with the other novices, he did not
succeed in escaping from its belly. In any event, the tortures are
equivalent to ritual death. The blows that the novice receives, the
insect bites, the itching caused by poisonous plants, the mutilations
— all these various forms of torture signify precisely that he is
killed by the mythical Animal which is the master of the initiation;
that he is torn to pieces and crushed in its maw, “digested” in its
belly.

The assimilation of initiatory tortures to the sufferings of the
novice in being swallowed and digested by the monster is con-
firmed by the symbolism of the cabin in which the boys are isolated.
Often the cabin represents the body or the open maw of a water
monster,®® a crocodile, for example, or of a snake.®® In some parts
of Ceram the opening through which the novices pass is called the
snake’s mouth. Being shut up in the cabin is equivalent to being
imprisoned in the monster’s belly. On Rooke Island, when the
novices are isolated in a cabin in the jungle a number of masked
men tell the women that their sons are being devoured by a terrify-
ing Being, named Marsaba.'^®

Sometimes entering the monster’s body includes quite elaborate
stage effects. Among some tribes of southeastern Australia, the
novice is made to lie down in a natural depression or an excava-
tion, and before him is set a piece of wood cut in two, representing
the jaws of the snake who is the master of the initiation.’^ But
New Guinea furnishes the most eloquent examples of the sym-
bolism of the initiatory cabin. A special house is built for the cir-
cumcision of the boys; it is in the form of the Monster Barlun,
who is believed to swsdlow the novices;’^ that is, the buUding has

36 RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

a “belly” and a “tail.”’^* The novice’s entrance into the cabin is
equivalent to entering the monster’s belly. Among the Nor-Papua
(north coast of central New Guinea) the novices are swallowed
and later disgorged by a spirit whose voice sounds like a flute.
Plastically, the spirit is also represented both by masks and by
small leaf huts into which the initiands enter.'’'^ The initiatory cabins
of the Kai and the Jabim have two entrances — one, representing
the monster’s mouth, is quite large; the other, which is much
smaller, symbolizes its tail.*^®

An equivalent rite is entrance into a dummy resembling an
aquatic monster (crocodile, whale, large fish). Among the Papuans
of New Guinea, for example, a monstrous dummy called Kaiemunu
is built of raffia; during initiation the novice has to enter the
monster’s belly. But in our day the initiatory meaning of the act
has been lost; the boy enters Kaiemunu while his father is still
finishing its construction.*^®

We shall have occasion to return to the symbolism of entrance
into a monster’s belly. For this initiatory pattern attained the
widest dissemination and has been constantly reinterpreted in
various cultural contexts. For the moment, let us say that the
symbolism of the cabin is considerably more complex than these
first examples have shown. The initiatory cabin represents not
only the belly of the devouring monster but also the womb.'^^ The
novice’s death signifies a return to the embryonic state. This is
not to be understood merely in terms of human physiology but also
in cosmological terms. It is not only a repetition of the first gesta-
tion and of carnal birth from the mother; it is also a temporary
return to the virtual, precosmic mode (symbolized by night and
darkness), followed by a rebirth that can be homologized with a
“creation of the world.”^® This need to repeat the cosmogony
periodically, and to homologize human experiences with the great
cosmic moments, is, furthermore, a characteristic of primitive and
archaic thought.

The memory of the secluded initiatory hut, far away in the forest,
was preserved in popular tales, even in those of Europe, long after
puberty rites had ceased to be performed. Psychologists have shown
the importance of certain archetypal images; and the cabin, the
forest, and darkness are such images — they express the eternal psy-
chodrama of a violent death followed by rebirth. The bush symbol-
izes both hell and cosmic night, hence death and virtualities; the
cabin is the maw of the devouring monster, in which the neophyte is

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

37

eaten and digested, but it is also a nourishing womb, in which he is
engendered anew. The symbols of initiatory death and of rebirth
are complementary.

As we saw earlier, some peoples assimilate the segregated
novices in the forest to the souls of the dead. They are often rubbed
with a white powder to make them resemble ghosts."^® They do not
cat with their fingers, because the dead do not use their fingers.®®
To give only a few examples, in some parts of Africa (the Babali
Negroes of Ituri)®^ and of New Guinea,®^ the novices eat with a
little stick. In Samoa they are obliged to use such sticks until the
wound from their circumcision has healed.®^ But this sojourn
among the dead is not without its rewards. The novices will receive
revelations of secret lore. For the dead know more than the living.
Here we have our first example of the religious importance of the
dead. The cult of the Ancestors is increasingly stressed, and the
figures of the Celestial Beings almost disappear from living re-
ligious practice. Ritual death tends to be valuated not only as an
initiatory ordeal necessary for a new birth but also as a privileged
situation in itself, for it allows the novices to live in the company
of the Ancestors. This new conception is destined to play a major
role in the religious history of mankind. Even in developed societies
the dead will be regarded as the possessors of arcane knowledge,
and prophecy or poetic inspiration will be sought where the dead
lie buried.

The Degrees of Revelation

But as we have seen, all forms of puberty initiation, even the
most elementary, involve the revelation of a secret and sacred
knowledge. Some peoples call their initiates “the knowing ones.”®^
In addition to the tribal traditions, the novices learn a new language,
which they will later use to communicate with one another.

A special language — or at least a vocabulary inaccessible to
women and the uninitiated — is the token of a cultural phenomenon
that will find its full development in the secret societies. There is a
progressive transformation of the community of initiates into an
even more closed confraternity, with new rites of admission and
many degrees of initiation. Now this phenomenon is already present
in rudimentary form in the most archaic cultures. To confine our
examples to Australia, in some tribes the puberty initiation con-
sists of a series of rituals sometimes separated by an interval of
several years,®® and — still more significant — not all the novices are

38

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

allowed to take part in them. Where subincision is customary it is
sometimes performed several years after circumcision, and repre-
sents a new degree of initiation. Among the Dieiri, for example,
subincision is the last of the five chief initiatory rites, and is not
open to all initiates.®® Among the Karadjeri the rites succeed one
another over a period of time that may be as long as ten years.
The reason for these long intervals is religious. As Tindale ex-
presses it, “many of the most important parts of the ritual are only
revealed to [the aspirant] after years have elapsed: it depends
upon his prestige and his power of learning.”®^ In other words,
access to the religious traditions of the tribe also depends upon
the candidate’s spiritual powers, on his capacity to experience the
sacred and to understand the mysteries.

Here we find the explanation not only for the appearance of
secret societies but also for: the organization of the confraternities
of medicine men, shamans, and mystics of all kinds. The under-
lying idea is both simple and fundamental: if the sacred is acces-
sible to every human being, including women, it is not exhausted
in its first revelations. Religious experience and knowledge have
degrees, higher and yet higher planes, which, by their very nature,
cannot be attained by all. Deeper religious experience and knowl-
edge demand a special vocation, or exceptional will power and
intelligence. Just as a man cannot become a shaman or a mystic
simply by wanting to, so he cannot rise to certain initiatory degrees
unless he demonstrates that he possesses spiritual qualities. In
some secret societies higher degrees can also be obtained through
lavish gifts; but we must not forget that for the primitive world,
wealth is a prestige that is magico-religious in nature.

The successive groups of facts that we have reviewed in this
chapter have enabled us to realize the complexity of puberty rites.
We saw that as a Supreme Being or his son is supplanted as director
of initiation by the Ancestors or Animal Gods, initiation becomes
more dramatic, and its fundamental pattern — death and resurrec-
tion— develops into detailed and often terrifying scenarios. We
saw too that the elementary initiatory ordeals (extraction of an
incisor, circumcision) are improved upon by an increasing number
of tortures, whose purpose, however, remains the same — ^to provide
the experience of ritual death. One element gains in importance —
the revelation of the sacredness of blood and sexuality. The mystery
of blood is often bound up with the mystery of food. The countless
dietary taboos perform a twofold function — economic, but also

THE INITIATORY ORDEALS

39

Spiritual. For, in the puberty rites, the novices are made aware of
the sacred vaJue of food and assume the adult condition; that is,
they no longer depend on their mothers and on the labor of others
for nourishment. Initiation, then, is equivalent to a revelation of
the sacred, of death, of sexuality, and of the struggle for food.
Only after having acquired these dimensions of human existence
does one become truly a man.

What also emerges for us from the facts analyzed in this chapter
is the increasingly important role of the Ancestors, usually repre-
sented by masks. Just as in Australia puberty initiations are per-
formed under the direction of the medicine men, so in New Guinea,
in Africa, in North America the rites are conducted by priests or
masked men; quite often, it is the representatives of the secret
societies — hence representatives of the Ancestors — who direct the
ceremonies throughout. Puberty initiations are performed under
the sponsorship of specialists in the sacred — ^whieh comes down to
saying that they are finally controlled by men with a certain re-
ligious vocation. The novices are taught not only by the old men but
also, and increasingly, by priests and members of the secret societies.
The most important aspects of the tribe’s religion — e.g., techniques
of ecstasy, the secrets and miracles of the medicine men, relations
with the Ancestors — are revealed to the novices by men who them-
selves possess a deeper religious experience, obtained as the result
of a special vocation or after a long apprenticeship. It follows that
puberty initiations will conform to a pattern that depends more
and more on the mystical tradition of the medicine men and of the
masked societies. And this will manifest itself in one direction by
an increase in secrecy, and in the other by a multiplication of initia-
tory degrees and by the spiritual, soci^, and even political pre-
dominance of a minority made up of high-degree initiates, the sole
repositories of the doctrine transmitted by the Ancestors.

In this religious perspective, initiation is equivalent to introduc-
ing the novice to the mythical history of the tribe; in other words,
the initiand learns the deeds of the Supernatural Beings, who, in the
dream times, established the present human condition and all
the religious, social, and cultural institutions of the tribe. All in all,
to know this traditional lore means to know the adventures of the
Ancestors and the other Supernatural Beings when they lived on
earth. In Australia these adventures amount to little more than
long wanderings during which the Beings of the dream times are
believed to have performed a certain number of acts. As we saw.

40

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

the novices are obliged to retrace these mythical journeys during
their initiation. They thus relive the events of the dream times.
For the Australians these primordial events represent a sort of
cosmogony — although, in general, the work of the dream times is
one of completing and perfecting: the mythical Ancestors do not
create the world, but transform it, thereby giving it its present
form; they do not create man, they civilize him. Often the terres-
trial existence of these primordial Beings ended by a tragic death
or by their disappearance under the earth or into the sky. This
means that their existence contains a dramatic element, which was
not present in the myths of the supreme celestial Beings of south-
eastern Australia. What is communicated to the novices is, then, a
quite eventful mythical history — and less and less the revelation
of the creative acts of the Supreme Beings. The doctrine trans-
mitted through initiation is increasingly confined to the history of
the Ancestor’s doings, that is, to a series of dramatic events that
took place in the dream times. To be initiated is equivalent to
learning what happened in the primordial Time — and not what
the Gods are and how the world and man were created. The sacred
and secret lore now depends on the mythical Ancestors, no longer
on the Gods. It was the mythical Ancestors who lived the primordial
drama that established the world in its present form — and conse-
quently it is they who know and can transmit this lore. In modern
terms, we could say that this sacred knowledge no longer belongs
to an ontology but to a mythical history.

CHAPTER ///

From Tribal Rites to Secret Cults

Initiation of Girls

Before examining some initiatory patterns that will show us the
continuity between puberty rites and the rites for entrance into
secret societies, we must give some consideration to initiations of
girls. They have been less studied than the boys’ initiations and
hence are not very well known. It is true that female puberty rites,
and especially their secret aspects, have been less accessible to
ethnologists. The majority of observers have given us descriptions
of them that are largely external. We have very little documenta-
tion on the religious instruction of girls during their initiation, and
especially on the secret rites that they are said to undergo. Despite
these gaps, it is possible to get an approximate idea of the structure
and morphology of girls’ initiations.

To begin, we may note three things: first, female puberty initia-
tions are less widespread than boys’ initiations, although they are
already documented in the ancient stages of culture (Australia,
Tierra del Fuego, and elsewhere);^ second, the rites are decidedly
less developed than those for boys’ initiations; and, third, girls’
initiations are individual. This last characteristic has had important
consequences. It is obviously explained by the fact that female
initiation begins with the first menstruation. This physiological
symptom, the sign of sexual maturity, compels a break — the young
girl’s removal from her familiar world. She is immediately isolated,
separated from the community — ^which reminds us of the boy’s
separation from his mother and segregation. In either sex, then,

41

42 wtes and symbols of initiation

initiation begins with a break, a rupture. But there is a difference:
for girls, the segregation takes place in each case immediately after
the j&rst menstruation, hence it is individual; whereas for boys,
initiation is collective, occurring for all at about the time of
puberty. The individual character of the young girl’s segregation,
which takes place on the appearance of the signs of menstruation,
explains the comparatively small number of initiatory rites. But
one thing must not be overlooked: the length of the segregation
varies from culture to culture — ^from three days (as in Australia
and India) to twenty months (New Zealand) or even several years
(Cambodia) . In other words, the girls do in the end form a group,
and then their initiation is performed collectively, ^ under the direc-
tion of their older female relatives (as in India) or of old women
(Africa) . These tutoresses instruct them in the secrets of sexuality
and fertility, and teach them the customs of the tribe and at least
some of its religious traditions — ^those accessible to women. The
education thus given is general, but its essence is religious; it con-
sists in a revelation of the sacrality of women. The girl is ritually
prepared to assume her specific mode of being, that is, to become
a creatress, and at the same time is taught her responsibilities in
society and in the cosmos, responsiblities which, among primitives,
are always religious in nature.

As we have noted, female initiatory rites — at least so far as
they are now known to us — are less dramatic than the rites for
boys. The important element in them is segregation. This takes
place either in the forest (as among the Swahili) or in a special
cabin, as among many North American tribes (Shushwap, Wintun,
and others), in Brazil (Coroado), in the New Hebrides, in the
Marshall Islands, but also among the Veddahs and among some
African peoples.^ In speaking of boys’ puberty rites, we referred
to the complex symbolism of the forest and the hut — a symbolism
which is at once that of the beyond, hence of death, and that of
the darkness of gestation in the mother’s womb. The symbolism of
darkness is also emphasized in the ceremonial segregation of girls,
for they are isolated in a dark comer of the house, and among many
peoples are forbidden to see the sun — a taboo whose explanation
lies in the mystical connection between the moon and women. Else-
where they are forbidden to let themselves be touched by anyone,
or to move. A prohibition peculiar to South American societies
forbids them to touch the ground; the girl novices spend their days
and nights in hammocks.^ Naturally there are some dietary restric-

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS 43

tions almost everywhere, and among some peoples the girl novices
wear a special costume.®

No less essential than the segregation that constitutes the first
rite of initiation is the ceremony that concludes the process. Among
some coast tribes of northern Australia, the girl undergoing her
first menstruation is isolated in a cabin for three days, during
which time she is subjected to various dietary taboos. She is the;i
painted with ocher and richly decorated by the women. “At the
climax,” Berndt writes, “all the women escort her at dawn to a
fresh water stream or lagoon.”® After this ritual bath she is led in
procession to the “main camp, amid a certain amount of acclama-
tion, and is socially accepted as a woman.”^ Berndt observes that
before the Mission was established in Arnhem Land, the ritual
was more complex and included songs. Modern ethnologists some-
times meet only with institutions that are on the verge of disappear-
ing. In the case that we are studying, however, the essentials have
been preserved, for the procession and the acclamation by the
women at the end of the ceremony are a characteristic feature of
female initiations. In some places the segregation terminates with
a collective dance, and this custom is characteristic especially of
the early cultivators (Pflanzervdlker) Among these same paleo-
agriculturalists, the girls who have been initiated are exhibited and
made much of,® or they visit the houses of the settlement in pro-
cession to receive gifts.^® Other external signs likewise mark the
end of initiation, for example, tattooing, or blackening the teeth;^^
some ethnologists, however, consider these customs innovations
due to the influence of totemic cultures.^^

The essential rite, then, is the solemn exhibition of the girl to
the entire community. It is a ceremonial announcement that the
mystery has been accomplished. The girl is shown to be adult,
^ that is, to be ready to assume the mode of being proper to woman.
To show something ceremonially — ^a sign, an object, an animal, a
man — is to declare a sacred presence, to acclaim the miracle of a
hierophany.^® This rite, which is so simple in itself, denotes a re-
ligious behavior that is archaic. Perhaps even before articulate
language, solemnly showing an object signified that it was regarded
as exceptional, singular, mysterious, sacred. Very probably this
ceremonial presentation of the initiated girl represents the earliest
stage of the ceremony. The collective dances mentioned earlier
express the same primordial experience in a way that is at
once more plastic and more dramatic.

44 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

It is clear that, even more than male rites of puberty, female
initiations are related to the mystery of blood. Some scholars
have even sought to explain the initiatory segregation of girls
by the primitive fear of menstrual blood. Frazer emphasized this
aspect of the problem and showed that women are isolated in
cabins during their menses, just as girls are at the first appearance
of this physiological symptom.^^ But Wilhelm Schmidt has demon-
strated that the two customs do not coincide: the monthly segre-
gation of women is a custom documented principally among no-
madic hunters and pastoral peoples, that is, in societies that deal
with animals and their products (meat, milk) and in which men-
strual blood is regarded as unlucky; whereas the initiatory segrega-
tion of girls is a custom peculiar to matriarchal societies. And,
Schmidt adds, at least among some of these matriarchal societies
the initiation of girls includes festivities manifesting the public joy
over the fact that the girls have reached the age of puberty and so
can found families.^® But, as we have seen, these festivities are too
archaic in structure to be regarded as a creation of the matriarchal
cycle, which, in Schmidt’s view, is a more recent sociocultural
phenomenon.

In any case, men’s fear of women’s blood does not explain the
puberty rites for girls. The fundamental experience, which alone
can enlighten us as to the genesis of the rites, is a female expe-
rience and is crystallized around the mystery of blood. Sometimes
this mystery is manifested under strange aspects. Such is the case,
for example, with the Dyaks, among whom the pubescent girl is
isolated for an entire year in a white cabin, is dressed in white, and
eats white foods. At the end of her segregation, she sucks the
blood from a young man’s opened vein, through a bamboo tube.^®
The meaning of this custom seems to be that during the period of
segregation the girl is neither man nor woman; hence she is con-
sidered “white,” “without blood.”^*^ Here we recognize the theme
of the temporary androgynization and asexuedity of novices, a
theme to which reference was made in the last chapter. For cases
are known in which girls are dressed as men during their initiation
period, just as boys wear female clothing during their novitiate.

Degrees in Female Initiations

Among some peoples female initiation includes several degrees.
Thus, among the Yao, initiation begins with the first menstruation,
is repeated and elaborated during the first pregnancy, and is only

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS

45

concluded with the birth of the first child.^® The mystery of blood
finds its completion in childbirth. For the woman, the revelation
that she is a creator of life constitutes a religious experience that
cannot be translated into masculine terms. The example of the Yao
female initiation with its three degrees enables us to understand
two closely related phenomena: first, the tendency of women to
organize in secret religious associations, modeled on the male con-
fraternities; second, the importance that some cultures give to the
ritual of childbirth. We shall discuss these women’s associations
when we come to study the organization of secret societies; we
shall then see that, at least in part, female secret societies have
borrowed certain morphological elements from the male con-
fraternities. As for the ritual of childbirth, it has sometimes given
rise to customs in which we can decipher the seeds (or perhaps the
vestiges) of a mystery. Traces of such mystical scenarios have been
preserved even in Europe. In Schleswig during the last century,
on the news that a child had been born, all the women of the
village went dancing and shouting to the house of the new mother.
If they met men on the way, they knocked their hats off and filled
them with dung; if they met a cart, they tore it to pieces and turned
the horse loose. After they had all met at the new mother’s house,
they set out running frantically through the village, shouting,
cheering, entering houses and taking whatever they wanted in
the way of food and drink; if they met men, they forced them to
dance.^^ Probably in early times certain secret rituals were per-
formed in the new mother’s house. We know that in the thirteenth
century such rituals were current in Denmark; having gathered
at the new mother’s house, the women made a straw dummy,
which they called the Ox, and danced with it, making lascivious
gestures and singing and shouting.^^^ These examples are valuable;
they show us that the ritual gatherings of women on the occasion
of childbirth tend to become secret associations.

To return to the girls’ puberty rites, I must add that during the
period of seclusion the novices learn ritual songs and dances and
also certain specifically feminine skills, especially spinning and
weaving. The symbolism of these crafts is highly significant; in
the final phases of culture we find them raised to the rank of a
principle explaining the world. The moon “spins” Time, and
“weaves” human lives.^i The Goddesses of Destiny are spinners.
We detect an occult connection between the conception of the
periodical creations of the world (a conception derived from a

46

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

lunar mythology) and the ideas of Time and of Destiny, on the
one hand, and, on the other, nocturnal work, women’s work, which
has to be performed far from the light of the sun and almost in
secret. In some cultures, after the seclusion of the girls is ended
they continue to meet in some old woman’s house to spin together.
Spinning is a perilous craft, and hence can be carried on
only in special houses and then only during particular periods and
certain hours. In some parts of the world spinning has been
given up, and even completely forgotten, because of its magical
peril.^^ Similar beliefs still persist today in Europe (e.g., the Ger-
manic fairies Perchta, Holda, Frau Holle). In some places —
Japan, for example^^ — we still find the mythological memory
of a permanent tension, and even conflict, between the groups of
young spinning girls and the men’s secret societies. At night the
men and their Gods attack the spinning girls and destroy not only
their work but also their shuttles and weaving apparatus.

There is a mystical connection between female initiations, spin-
ning, and sexuality. Even in developed societies, girls enjoy a
certain prenuptial freedom, and their meetings with boys take place
in the house where they gather to spin. The custom was still alive
in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century.^^ It is surprising
that in cultures where virginity is highly prized, meetings between
young men and girls are not only tolerated but encouraged by
their parents. We have here not a case of dissolute manners but a
great secret — ^the revelation of female sacrality; the experience
touches the springs of life and fertility. Prenuptial freedoms for
girls are not erotic in nature, but ritual; they constitute fragments
of a forgotten mystery, not profane festivities. In the Ukraine,
during certain holy periods, and especially on the occasion of
marriages, girls and women behave in a manner that is almost
orgiastic.^® This complete reversal of behavior — from modesty to
exhibitionism — indicates a ritual goal, which concerns the entire
community. It is a case of the religious need for periodical abolition
of the norms that govern profane life — ^in other words, of the need
to suspend the law that lies like a dead weight on customs, and to
re-create the state of absolute spontaneity. The fact that cases of
such ritual behavior have been preserved down to the twentieth
century among peoples long since Christianized proves, I believe,
that we are here dealing with an extremely archaic religious experi-
ence, a basic experience of woman’s soul. We shall encounter other
expressions of the same fundamental experience later on, when

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS 47

we come to examine some of the women’s secret organizations.

To sum up, girls’ initiations are determined by a mystery
“natural” to the female sex, the appearance of menstruation, with
all that this phenomenon implies for primitives: e.g., periodical
purification, fecundity, curative and magical powers. The girl is
to become conscious of a transformation that comes about in a
natural way and to assume the mode of being that results from it,
the mode of being of the adult woman. Girls’ initiations do not
include such typical elements in the initiations for boys as the
revelation of a Divine Being, of a sacred object (the buU-roarer),
and of an origin myth — in short, the revelation of an event that
took place in the beginning, an integral part of the tribe’s sacred
history and hence belonging, not to the natural world, but to culture.
It should be noted that feminine ceremonies in connection with
menstruation are not based on an origin myth, as is always the
case with masculine puberty rites. There are certain myths ac-
cording to which the initiation ceremonies now in the possession
of men originally belonged to women; but these myths have nothing
to do with the pre-eminent feminine mystery, menstruation. The
few myths connected with the origin of menstruation do not fall
in the category of initiatory myths.

It follows from all this that, unlike women, men during their
period of initiatory training are made conscious of “invisible” real-
ities and learn a sacred history that is not evident; i.e., is not given in
immediate experience, A novice understands the meaning of cir-
cumcision after having learned the origin myth. Everything that
happens to him during initiation happens because certain events
took place in mythical times and basically changed the human
condition. For boys, initiation represents an introduction to a world
that is not immediate — the world of spirit and culture. For girls,
on the contrary, initiation involves a series of revelations concerning
the secret meaning of a phenomenon that is apparently natural —
the visible sign of their sexual maturity.

An Extant Australian Secret Cult

Let us now examine an Australian secret cult, Kunapipi, which
still flourishes in Arnhem Land and in the west-central Northern
Territory. From the point of view of our investigation, its interest
is twofold: first, although its most important ceremonies are con-
fined to men, the ideology of Kunapipi is dominated by female
religious symbolism, especially by the figure of the Great Mother,

48

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

source of universal fertility; second, although its initiatory scenario
is of a structural type already known to us — ^for the chief
moment is a ritual swallowing — ^it also offers some new elements.
In other words, Kunapipi is an excellent point of departure for our
comparative investigation into the continuity of initiatory patterns.
Only young men who have already undergone the initiatory rites
of puberty are eligible for initiation into the Kunapipi cult. Hence
we have here not an age-grading ceremony but a higher initiation
— ^which once again confirms primitive man’s desire to deepen
his religious experience and knowledge.

The ritual goal of Kunapipi is twofold: the initiation of the
young men, and the renewal of the energies that ensure cosmic life
and universal fertility. This renewal is obtained through the re-
enactment of the original myth. The sacred power possessed by
the Supernatural Beings is released by the reactualization of the
acts that they performed during the “Dreaming Period.”^® We
here have, then, a religious conception with which we are already
more or less familiar: an origin myth forms the basis for an initi-
atory ritual; to perform the ritual is to reactualize the primordial
Time, to become contemporary with the Dreaming Period the
novices participate in the mystery, and on this occasion the entire
community and its cosmic milieu are bathed in the atmosphere
of the Dreaming Period; the cosmos and society emerge regener-
ated. It is clear, then, that the initiation of a group of young men
affects not only their own religious situation but also that of
the community. Here we find the seed of a conception that will
be developed in higher religions — that the spiritual perfection of an
elite exerts a beneficial influence on the rest of society.

Let us now turn to the cult proper. It is based on a rather com-
plex myth, of which I need mention only the chief elements. In
the Dreaming Period, the two Wauwalak Sisters, the older of whom
had just borne a child, set out into the north. These two sisters
are really the “dual Mothers.” The name of the cult, Kunapipi, is
translated “Mother” or “Old Woman.” After a long journey, the
Sisters stopped near a well, built a hut, and tried to cook some
animals. But the animals fled from the fire and threw themselves
into the well. For, the aborigines now explain, the animals knew
that one of the Sisters, being impure because of her “afterbirth
blood,” ought not to go near the well, in which the Great Snake
Julunggul lived. And indeed Julunggul, attracted by the smell of
blood, emerged from his subterranean home, raised his fore part

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS

49

threateningly — which brought on clouds and lightning — and
crawled toward the hut. The younger Sister tried to keep him
away by dancing, and her dances are reactualized in the Kunapipi
ceremony. Finally, the Snake poured spittle all over the hut in
which the two Sisters and the child had taken refuge, swallowed
it, then straightened up to his full length, his head toward the sky.
Soon afterwards he disgorged the two Sisters and the child.
Bitten by white ants, they returned to life — ^but Julunggul swallowed
them again, this time for good.

This myth provides the foundation for two other rituals besides
Kunapipi, one of which, the djunggawon, constitutes the rite of
puberty initiation. The aborigines explain the origin of all these
rituals thus: a python, Lu’ningu, having seen Julunggul swallow
and then disgorge the two Sisters, wanted to imitate him. He went
wandering about the country, swallowing young men, but when
he disgorged them they were dead and sometimes reduced to
skeletons. In revenge, men killed him, and later they raised a monu-
ment representing him — the two posts called jelmalandjU To imitate
the Snake’s hissing, they made bull-roarers.^® Finally, the cere-
monial headman cut his arm, saying: “We make ourselves like
those two women.”^®

In the Kunapipi ritual, Berndt writes, the young novices, “leav-
ing the main camp for the sacred ground are said to be swallowed
by Lu’ningu, just as he swallowed the young men in the Dreaming
Era; and in the old days they had to stop away from womenfolk
from a period of two weeks to two months, symbolizing their stay
inside the belly of the Snake.”^® But the two Snakes — Julunggul
and Lu’ningu — are confused, for on their return to the main
camp, the men tell the women, “All the young boys have gone
today; Julunggul has swallowed them up.”®^ But in any case, the
symbolism of the ritual swallowing is more complex. On the one
hand, the novices, assimilated to the two Sisters, are supposed to
have been swallowed by the Snake; on the other hand, by entering
the sacred ground, they symbolically return into the primordial
Mother’s womb. We find that they are painted with ocher and with
“arm-blood,” representing the blood of the two Wauwalak Sisters;
“that is,” Berndt writes, “for the purpose of the ritual they become
the Two Sisters, and are swallowed by Julunggul; and on their
emergence from the ritual, they are revivified just as were the
women.”®2 But then too, according to the aborigines, the “triangular
dancing place” represents the Mother’s womb. To quote Bemdt’s

50 RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INUTAUON

account again: “As the neophytes leave the camp for the sacred
groimd, they themselves are said to become increasingly sacred,
and to enter the Mother; they go into her uterus, the ring place,
as happened in the beginning. When the ritual is completed the
Mother ‘lets them out’; they emerge from the ring place, and pass
once more into ordinary life.”*®

The symbolism of return to the womb recurs during the course
of the ritual. At a certain moment, the neophytes are covered over
with bark and “told to go to sleep.” They remain there, the abo-
rigines say, “covered up in the hut like the Wauwalak Sisters.”®*
Finally, after an orgiastic ritual, which includes an exchange of
wives, the final ceremony is performed. Two forked posts, with a
thick connecting pole between them, are set up between the sacred
ground and the main camp. The pole is covered with branches,
and the initiates are stationed behind the branches; wholly in-
visible from outside, they remain there clinging to the pole with
their feet on the ground, supposedly “hanging from the pole.” They
are, that is, in the womb, and they will emerge reborn — “their spirit
comes out new.”®® Two men climb up onto the forked posts, and
there cry like newborn infants, for they are “the chUdren of Wau-
walak.” Finally all return to the main camp, painted with ocher and
arm-blood.

I have dwelt on this Kunapipi ritual because, thanks to the work
of Ronald Berndt, we are in a position to know not only a number
of valuable details but also the meaning that the aborigines attrib-
ute to them. It must be added that the Kunapipi ritual does not
represent an archaic state of Australian culture; very probably it
has been influenced by more recent Melanesian contributions.®*
The tradition that in the beginning women possessed all cult secrets
and all sacred objects, and that men later stole them,®^ indicates a
matriarchal ideology. Obviously, a number of the ritual elements
are pan-Australian — ^for example, the fire-throwing, the bull-
roarer and the myth of its origin, the custom of covering women
and neophytes with branches. The essential characteristic of Kun-
apipi, is, as we saw, the initiatory pattern of return to the womb.
We found it more than once: when the neophytes enter the sacred
ground; when they wait under the branches, “hanging from the
pole”; ^ally, when they are considered to be in the two Sisters’
hut. Their ritual swallowing by the Snake is also to be interpreted
as a return to the womb — on the one hand, because the Snake
is often described as female;®* on the other, because entering the

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS 51

belly of a monster also carries a symbolism of return to the embry-
onic state.

The frequent reiteration of the return to the primordial Mother’s
womb is striking. The sexual pantomimes and especially the ritual
exchange of wives — an orgiastic ceremony that plays a leading
role in the Kunapipi cult — further emphasize the sacred atmosphere
of the mystery of procreation and childbirth. In fact, the general
impression that we receive from the whole ceremonial is that it
represents not so much a ritual death followed by resurrection as a
complete regeneration of the initiate through his gestation and
birth by the Great Mother. This of course does not mean that the
symbolism of death is completely absent, for being swallowed by
the Snake and even returning to the womb necessarily imply death
to the profane condition. The symbolism of return to the womb is
always ambivalent. Yet it is the particular notes of generation
and gestation which dominate the Kunapipi cult. We here have,
then, a perfect example of an initiatory pattern organized and con-
structed around the idea of a new birth, and no longer around the
idea of symbolic death and resurrection.

Initiatory Symbolisms of Return to the Womb

We find this same pattern in a large number of initiatory myths
and rites. The idea of gestation and childbirth is expressed by a
series of homologizable images — entrance into the womb of the
Great Mother (Mother Earth), or into the body of a sea monster,
or of a wild beast, or even of a domestic animal. Obviously, the
initiatory hut also belongs to the same family of images; and I
must here add an image that we have not so far encountered — the
pot image. It would take far more time than is available to make
an adequate study of all the groups of rites and myths which have
this pattern. I must confine myself to only a few aspects. To sim-
plify the exposition, let me begin by grouping the documents into
two important categories. In the first, return to the womb, though
implying a certain element of peril (such as is in any case connected
with every religious act), appears as an operation that is mysterious
but comparatively without danger. In the second category of docu-
ments, on the contrary, the return implies the risk of being torn to
pieces in the monster’s jaws (or in the vagina dentata of Mother
Earth) and of being digested in its belly. Although the facts are
actually more complex, we can cite examples illustrating these
two types of initiation by return to the womb — ^let us call them the

52 Rttes and symbols of initiation

easy and the dramatic types. In the former, the stress is on the
mystery of initiatory childbirth. In the dramatic type, the theme
of new birth is accompanied, and sometimes dominated, by the idea
that, as an initiatory ordeal, it must involve the risk of death. As
we shall see in a moment, Brahmanic initiations fall in the category
of rites that actualize a new gestation and new birth of the novice,
but without implying that he must first die or even that'he is in any
great danger of death. (Let me repeat: the symbolism of death to
the profane condition is always present; but, as we have seen, this
is characteristic of every genuine religious experience.)

As to the second type of initiatory return, it includes a consider-
able number of forms and variants, and has produced offshoots
and developments, charged with more and more subtle meanings,
even in the religions, the metaphysics, and the mysticisms of highly
developed societies. For we find the initiatory pattern of the perilous
return to the womb, first, in the myths in which the Hero is
swallowed by a sea monster and then emerges victorious by forc-
ing his way out of its belly; second, in the myths and miraculous
narratives of shamans, who during their trances are supposed to
enter the belly of a giant fish or whale; third, in a number of myths
of an initiatory traversal of a vagina dentata, or a perilous descent
into a cave or crevasse assimilated to the mouth or the uterus of
Mother Earth — a descent that brings the hero to the other world;
fourth, and lastly, the same pattern is recognizable in the whole
group of myths and symbols that have to do, for example, with a
“paradoxic^ passage” between two millstones in constant motion,
between two rocks that come together from instant to instant (see
pages 64 ff.), or over a bridge narrow as a thread and sharp
as a knife blade. (Paradoxical because impossible on the plane of
daily experience, the passage whose images I have just cited will
serve, in later mysticisms and metaphysics, to express access to a
transcendental state.) What characterizes all forms of this dan-
gerous return to the womb is that the Hero undertakes it as a
living man and an adult — that is, he does not die and he does not
return to the embryonic state. The stake involved in the enterprise
is sometimes extraordinary — ^nothing less than winning immortality.
And as we shall see in the myth of the Polynesian Hero Maui, it
is because Maui did not succeed in coming alive out of the body
of the Great Mother that humanity did not win immortality. I
shall devote part of the next chapter to this whole group of initia-

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS 53

tory myths and rites and there try to complete and refine this too
rapid outline.

Symbolism of New Birth in Indian Initiations

For the moment, let me cite some examples illustrating the non-
perilous type of initiatory return to the embryonic state. Let us
begin with the Brahmanic initiations. I shall make no attempt -to
present them in their entirety; we shall confine ourselves to the
theme of gestation and new birth. In ancient India the upanayana
ceremony — that is, the boy’s introduction to his teacher — is the
homologue to primitive puberty initiations. Indeed, something of
the behavior of novices among the primitives is still preserved in
ancient India; the brahmacarin lives in his teacher’s house, dresses
in the skin of a black antelope, eats nothing but food for which he
has begged, and is bound by a vow of absolute chastity. (Indeed,
the name for this period of study with a teacher — brahmacarya —
finally came to express the idea of sexual continence.) Unknown
to the Rig-Veda, the upanayana is first documented in the
Atharva-Veda (XI, 5, 3), and here the motif of gestation and
rebirth is clearly expressed; the teacher is said to change the boy
into an embryo and keep him in his belly for three nights. The
Shatapatha Brahmana (XI, 5, 4, 12-13) gives the following details:
the teacher conceives when he puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder,
and on the third day the boy is reborn as a brahman. The A tharva-
Veda (XIX, 17) calls one who has gone through the upanayana
“twice-born” (dvi-ja); and it is here that this term, which had an
extraordinary career in India, appears for the first time.

Obviously, the second birth is spiritual in nature, and later texts
frequently insist on this point. According to the Laws of Manu
(II, 144), he who imparts the word of the Veda to the novice
(that is, the brahman) shall be regarded as father and mother;
between the begetter and the brahman, it is the latter who is the
true father (II, 146); true birth, that is, birth to immortality, is
given by the Savitri formula (II, 148).®® This conception is pan-
Indian and is taken up again by Buddhism; the novice forsakes his
family name and becomes a “son of Buddha” {sakya-putto) y for he
has been “born among the saints” (ariya). As Kassapa said of
himself: “Natural son of the Blessed One, bom of his mouth,
born of dhamma, fashioned by dhamma . . {Samyutta Nikaya,

II, 221).

' Buddhist imagery also preserves the memory that the second.

54 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

spiritual birth is accomplished like that of the chick, that is, “by
breaking the eggshell.”^®

The initiatory symbolism of the egg and the chick is ancient;
very probably it is the “twofold birth” of birds which is at the
origin of the image of the dvi-ja. In any case, we are here in the
presence of archetypal images, already documented on the level
of archaic cultures. Among the Kavirondo Bantu, these words
are spoken of initiates: “The white chick is now creeping out of
the egg, we are like newly fired pots.”^^ It is remarkable that
the same image brings together two motifs that are at once em-
bryological and intiatory, the egg and the pot — ^which, by the way,
we shall meet again in India.

In addition to this new birth obtained through the upanayana,
Brahmanism has an initiatory ritual, the diksha, which must be
performed by anyone who is preparing to offer the soma sacrifice
and which, properly speaking, consists in a return to the fetal
state .^2 The Rig-Veda seems to know nothing of the diksha, but it
is documented in the Atharva-Veda. Here the brahmacarin — that
is, the novice undergoing the initiatory puberty rite — is called the
dikshita, “he who practices the diksha** Herman Lommel^^ has
rightly emphasized the importance of this passage (Atharva-Veda,
XI, 5, 6): the novice is homologized with one in the course of
being reborn to make himself worthy to perform the soma
sacrifice. For this sacrifice implies a preliminary sanctification of
the sacrificer — and to obtain it he undergoes a return to the
womb. The texts are perfectly clear. According to the Aitareya
Brahmana (I, 3) : “Him to whom they give the diksha, the priests
make into an embryo again. They sprinkle him with water; the
water is man’s sperm. . . . They conduct him to the special shed;
the special shed is the womb of the dikshita; thus they make him

enter the womb that befits him They cover him with a garment;

the garment is the caul. . . . Above that they put the black antelope
skin; verily the placenta is above the caul. ... He closes his
hands; verUy the embryo has its hands closed so long as it is within,
the child is bom with closed hands. ... He casts off the black
antelope skin to enter the final bath; therefore embryos come into
the world with the placenta cast off. He keeps on his garment
to enter it and therefore a child is bom with a caul upon it.”

The parallel texts emphasize the embryological and obstetrical
character of the rite with plentiful imagery. “The dikshita is an
embryo, his garment is the caul,” and so on, says the Taittiriya

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS

55

Samhita (I, 3, 2). The same work (VI 2, 5, 5) also repeats the
image of the dikshita-tmhxyo, completed by that of the hut
assimilated to the womb — an extremely ancient and widespread
image; when the dikshita comes out of the hut, he is like the
embryo emerging from the womb. The Maitrayani-Samhita (III,
6, 1 ) says that the initiate leaves this world and “is born into the
world of the Gods”; the cabin is the womb for the dikshita, the
antelope skin the placenta. The reason for this return to the womb
is emphasized more than once. “In truth man is unborn. It is
through sacrifice that he is born” (III, 6,1). And it is stressed that
man’s true birth is spiritual: “The dikshita is semen,” the Maitra--
yani-Samhita adds (III, 6, 1) — ^that is, in order to reach the
spiritual state that will enable him to be reborn among the Gods,
the dikshita must symbolically become what he has been from the
beginning. He abolishes his biological existence, the years of his
human life that have already passed, in order to return to a situa-
tion that is at once embryonic and primordial; he “goes back” to
the state of semen, that is, of pure virtuality. This theme of going
back in order to abolish the historical duration that has already
elapsed and to begin a new life, with all its possibilities intact, has
so obsessed humanity that we find it in a great many contexts and
even in highly developed soteriologies and mysticisms.^^ Obviously,
all these initiatory rites of return to the womb have a mythical
model — it is Indra who, to prevent the birth of a terrifying monster
after the union between the word (Vac) and sacrifice (yajha)^
turned himself into an embryo and entered Vac’s womb.^®

I should like to draw special attention to this point: the return
to the womb represented by the diksha is renewable; it is accom-
plished each time that the soma sacrifice is performed. And since
the sacrificer is already “twice-born” by virtue of his initiation
{upanayana) , it follows that the purpose of the diksha is to regen-
erate the sacrificer so that he can share in the sacred. This return
to the womb obviously implies the abolition of past time. The texts
do not say this expressly, but there is no explanation for the return
to the beginning except the desire once more to begin a “pure”
existence, that is, one which has not yet undergone the evil effects
of Time. The same ritual is used on other occasions too; for ex-
ample, the novice who has broken his vows must watch all night
by the fire, wrapped in a black antelope skin out of which he crawls
on his hands and knees at dawn {Baudhayana Dharmashastra^
III, 4, 4). To be wrapped in a skin signifies gestation, and crawling

56 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

out of it symbolizes a new birth. The rite and the signification are
also found on other cultural levels. Among some Bantu peoples,
the boy, before being circumcised, is the object of a ceremony
called “being bom anew.” The father sacrifices a ram, and three
days later wraps the boy in the animal’s stomach membrane and
skin. But before being wrapped up, the boy has to get into bed
beside his mother and cry like an infant. He remains in the ram
skin for three days. I may add that the dead are buried wrapped in
ram skins and in the embryonic position.^®

To return to India, we have still to examine another rite involv-
ing return to the womb. This, too, is performed for the purpose of
obtaining a new birth, whether to attain a higher mode of being (for
example, becoming a Brahman) or to obtain purification from
some great defilement (for example, that represented by a journey
into another country). This rite is the Hiranyagarbha, literally
“golden embryo.” First described in the Atharva-Veda Parishishta
(XIII), it showed exceptional vitality, for it was still in use in the
nineteenth century.^'^ The ceremony is as follows. The person
undergoing the rite is placed in a golden receptacle in the shape of
a cow, upon emerging from which he is regarded as an infant and
is put through the rites of birth. But as such a receptacle is too
costly, a gold reproduction of the womb (yoni) is commonly used.
The person undergoing the rite is assimilated to the golden embryo
{hiranyagarbha). This name is also one of the cognomens of
Prajapati and of Brahman — ^which is understandable, for, in India
as elsewhere, gold is a symbol of immortality and perfection. Being
transformed into a golden embryo, the person undergoing the rite
in some sort appropriates to himself the indestructibility of the
metal and participates in immortality. Gold is solar; then too, there
is a whole mythico-iconographic complex which presents the sun
as descending into darkness even as the novice, as embryo, enters
the uterine darkness of the initiatory hut.®®

But the symbolism of gold has here only overlaid an older and
more universal theme, that of mythical rebirth in a cow, or in
a pot in the shape of a womb. The cow is one of the epiphanies of
the Great Mother. Herodotus (11, 129) relates that Mycerinus
bmried his daughter in a golden cow, and at Bali there are still
coffins in the shape of a cow.®® The Rig-Veda says nothing of the
turanyagarbha ritual, whether because it was not known in Vedic
times or because it was not then practiced in the priestly and
military circles in which the Rig-Vedic hymns were elaborated and

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS

57

circulated. The fact that the hiranyagarbha ritual appears in the
Atharva-Veda Parishishta, and that, in modern times, it is practiced
chiefly in southern India (Travancore, Comorin) and in Assam,
indicates a probable pre-Aryan origin. It is perhaps one of the
traces left by the great Afro-Asiatic culture which, between the
fourth and third millennia, extended from the eastern Mediterranean
and Mesopotamia to India. However this may be, the hiranyagarbha
initiatory rite is especially important for the equivalence that it
establishes between the three symbols of the Mother Goddess —
cow, womb, and pot. In southern India and in Borneo, the Great
Mother is frequently represented in the form of a pot.®® That this
is always a symbol of the uterus is proven, for India, by the
miraculous birth of the sages Agastya and Vasishta from a pot,®^
and elsewhere in the world by burials in urns in the embryonic
position.®^ All these rites and extremely complex symbolisms
obviously reach beyond the sphere of initiation, but it was neces-
sary to mention them briefly in order to show that we are in the
presence of general conceptions of life, death, and rebirth, and
that the initiatory concept with which we are concerned is only
one aspect of this extensive world view.

Multiple Meanings of the Symbolism of the Embryo

It is noteworthy that the initiatory theme of return to the em-
bryonic state recurs even on higher levels of culture, as, for ex-
ample, in the Taoist techniques of mystical physiology. Indeed,
“embryonic breathing” (fai-si), which plays a considerable role
in neo-Taoism, is imagined as respiration in a closed circuit, in
the manner of a fetus; the adept tries to imitate the circulation of
blood and breath from mother to child and from child to mother.
The Preface to the Tai-si k*eou kiue (“Oral Formulas for Embry-
onic Breathing”) clearly expresses the goal of the technique in
one sentence; “By returning to the base, by returning to the
origin, one drives away old age, one returns to the fetal state.”®®
A Taoist text of the modern syncretistic school puts it as follows:
“That is why the (Buddha) Ju-Lai (Tathagata), in his great
mercy, revealed the method of the (alchemical) work of Fire and
taught men to enter the womb again in order to recreate their
(true) nature and (the fullness of) their portion in life.”®^

The same motif is documented among Western alchemists: the
adept must return to his mother’s breast, or even cohabit with her.
According to Paracelsus, “he who would enter the Kingdom of

58

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

God must first enter with his body into his mother and there die.”®®
Return to the womb is sometimes presented in the form of incest
with the mother. Michael Maier tells us that “Dephinas, an anony-
mous philosopher, in his treatise, the Secretus Maximus, speaks
very clearly of the mother, who, of natural necessity, must unite
with her son” {cum filio ex necessitate naturae conjungenda)
Obviously, the mother symbolizes nature in the primordial state,
the prima materia of the alchemists. This is proof of the symbolic
plurivalence of return to the womb, a plurivalence that enables it
to be constantly revaluated in different spiritual situations and
cultural contexts.

Another whole series of initiatory rites and myths, concerning
caves and mountain crevasses as symbols of the womb of Mother
Earth, could also be cited. I will merely say that caves played a role
in prehistoric initiations, and that the primordial sacredness of the
cave is still decipherable in its semantic modifications. The Chinese
term tong, “cave,” finally came to have the meaning “mysterious,
profound, transcendent”; that is, it became equivalent to the arcana
revealed in initiations.®'^

Although it is risky to compare religious documents belonging
to such different ages and cultures, I have taken the risk because
all these religious facts fit into a pattern. Initiations by return to
the womb have as their first aim the novice’s recovery of the
embryonic situation. From this primordial situation the various
forms of initiations which we have reviewed develop in different
directions, for they pursue different ends. That is, having sym-
bolically returned to the state of “semen” or “embryo,” the novice
can do one of four things. He can resume existence, with all its
possibilities intact. (This is the goal of the hiranyagarbha cere-
monies and of “embryonic breathing,” and the same motif is amply
documented in archaic therapies.)®® Or he can reimmerse himself
in the cosmic sacrality ruled by the Great Mother (as, for example,
in the Kunapipi ceremonies). Or he can attain to a higher state of
existence, that of the spirit (which is the goal of the upanayana),
or prepare himself for participation in the sacred (the goal of the
diksha). Or, finally, he can begin an entirely different, a tran-
scendent mode of existence, homologizable to that of the Gods (the
goal of Buddhism). From all this, one common characteristic
emerges — access to the sacred and to the spirit is always figured as
an embryonic gestation and a new birth. Every initiate in this cate-
gory is twice-bom, and even — ^in the case of the Kunapipi ceremony

FROM TRIBAL RITES TO SECRET CULTS

59

and the diksha — is born a number of times. Sacrality, spirituality,
and immortality are expressed in images that, in one way or another,
signify the beginning of life.

Primitives, of course, always think of the beginning of life in a
cosmological context. The Creation of the world constitutes the
exemplary model for all living creation. A life that begins in the
absolute sense is equivalent to the birth of a world. The sun,
plunging every evening into the darkness of death and into the
primordial waters, symbol of the uncreated and the virtual, re-
sembles both the embryo in the womb and the neophyte hidden in
the initiatory hut. When the sun rises in the morning, the world
is reborn, just as the initiate emerges from his hut. In all probability,
burial in the embryonic position is explained by the mystical inter-
connection between death, initiation, and return to the womb. In
some cultures this close connection will finally bring about the
assimilation of death to initiation — ^the dying man is regarded as
undergoing an initiation. But burial in the fetal position especially
emphasizes the hope of a new beginning of life — ^which does not
mean an existence reduced to its mere biological dimensions. For
the primitive, to live is to share in the sacrality of the cosmos. And
this will suflBce to keep us from falling into the error of explaining
all initiatory rites and symbols of return to the womb by the desire
to prolong a merely biological existence. Such an existence is a
quite recent discovery in the history of humanity — a discovery
that was made possible precisely by a radical desacralization of
nature. On the level on which our study is being conducted, life is
still a sacred reality. And this, I think, explains the continuity
between archaic rites and symbols of initiatory “new birth,” on
the one hand, and, on the other, techniques of longevity, of spiritual
rebirth, of divinization, and even such ideas of immortality and
absolute freedom as we find, in the historical period, in India and
China.

The examples just given show how an initiatory scenario that
originally determined puberty rites was capable of being used in
ceremonies pursuing other ends. This multivalence is easy to
understand; briefly, what takes place is an increasingly broad appli-
cation of a paradigmatic method, especially that employed to
“make” a man. Since the boy is made an adult by an initiation
involving return to the womb, it is hoped that similar results will
be obtained when other things are to be made — for example, when
the object is to make (that is, to obtain) long life or immortality.

60

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

In the end, all kinds of making are homologized by being identi-
fied with the supreme example of the “made,” the cosmogony.
Attaining to another mode of being — ^that of spirit — is equivalent
to being born a second time, to becoming a new man. The most
striking expression of newness is birth. The discovery of spirit is
homologized to the appearance of life, and the appearance of life
to the appearance of the world, to the cosmogony.

In the dialectic that made all these homologies possible, we
discern the emotion of primitive man discovering the life of spirit.
The newness of the spiritual life, its autonomy, could find no better
expression than the images of an “absolute beginning,” images
whose structure is anthropocosmic, deriving at once from em-
bryology and from cosmogony.

CHAPTER IV

Individual Initiations and Secret Societies

IIP

Descent to the Underworld and Heroic Initiations

Part of the last chapter was devoted to initiatory rites of return
to the womb implying the initiand’s symbolic transformation into
an embryo. In all these contexts, the return to the mother
signifies return to the chthonian Great Mother. The initiand
is bom again from the womb of Mother Earth {Terra Mater).
But as I had occasion to mention before, other myths and
beliefs exist in which this initiatory pattern displays two
new elements: first, the Hero enters the Great Mother’s womb
without returning to the embryonic state; second, the enterprise
is particularly dangerous. There is a Polynesian myth which admir-
ably illustrates this type of initiatory return to the womb. After a
life full of adventures, Maui, the great Maori Hero, returned to his
native country and the house of his ancestress Hine-mi-te-po, the
Great Lady (of Night). He found her asleep and, throwing off his
clothes, entered the giantess’ body. He made his way through it
without being stopped, but when he was about to emerge — ^that
is, when half his body was still inside her mouth — the birds that
were accompanying him burst out laughing. Waking suddenly, the
Great Lady (of Night) clenched her teeth and cut the Hero in two,
killing him. It is because of this, the Maoris say, that man is
mortal; if Maui had been able to get out of his ancestress’ body
safe and sound, men would have become immortal.^

Maui’s ancestress is Mother Earth. To enter her body is equiv-
alent to descending alive into the depths of the earth, that is, into

61

62

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

Hell. Here, then, we have a descent to the Underworld, such as we
find documented, for example, in the myths and sagas of the
ancient East and of the Mediterranean world. From one point of
view, we may say that aU these myths and sagas have an initiatory
structure; to descend into Hell alive, confront its monsters and
demons, is to undergo an initiatory ordeal. I may add that similar
flesh-and-blood descents into Hell are characteristic of heroic
initiations, whose goal is the conquest of bodily immortality. Of
course, these instances belong to initiatory mythology, and not to
ritual properly speaking; but myths are often more valuable than
rites for our understanding of religious behavior. For it is the
myth which most completely reveals the deep, and often uncon-
scious, desire of the religious man.

In all these contexts, the chthonian Great Mother shows herself
pre-eminently as Goddess of Death and Mistress of the Dead;
that is, she displays threatening and aggressive aspects. In the
funerary mythology of Malekula, a terrifying female figure, named
Temes or Le-hev-hev, awaits the dead man’s soul at the mouth of
a cave or beside a rock. Before her, drawn on the ground, is a
labyrinthine design; and when the dead man comes near, the
woman obliterates half of the design. If the dead man already
knows the labyrinthine design — ^that is, if he has been initiated —
he finds the road easily; if he does not, the woman devours him.^
As the work of Deacon and Layard has shown, the numerous
labyrinthine designs drawn on the ground in Malekula are intended
to teach the road to the abode of the dead.^ In other words, the
labyrinth plays the role of a post-mortem initiatory ordeal; it
falls in the category of the obstacles that the dead person — or,
in other contexts, the Hero — must confront in his journey through
the beyond. What I should like to emphasize here is that the
labyrinth is presented as a “dangerous passage” into the bowels
of Mother Earth, a passage in which the soul runs the risk of
being devoured by a female monster. Malekula gives us other myth-
ical figures of the threatening and dangerous female principle;
for example, the Crab Woman with two immense claws,^ or a
giant clam (Tridacna deresa)^ which, when it is open, resembles
the female sexual organ.® These terrifying images of aggressive
female sexuality and devouring motherhood bring out still more
clearly the initiatory character of descent into the body of the
chthonian Great Mother. For Hentze® was able to show that a
number of South American iconographic motifs represent the

INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 63

mouth of Mother Earth as a vagina dentata. The theme of the
vagina dentata is quite complex, and I do not intend to treat it
here. But it is important to note that the ambivalence of the chthon-
ian Great Mother is sometimes expressed, mythically and icono-
graphically, by identifying her mouth with the vagina dentata. In
initiatory m)^hs and sagas, the Hero’s passage through a giantess’
belly and his emergence through her mouth are equivalent to a
new birth. But the passage is infinitely dangerous.

To realize the difference between this initiatory motif and the
pattern that we studied in one of the preceding chapters, we need
only remember the situation of the novices shut up in initiatory
cabins in the shape of some marine monster; they are supposed to
have been swallowed by the monster and to be in its belly, hence
they are “dead,” digested, and in process of being reborn. One day
the monster will disgorge them — that is, they will be born again.
But in the group of myths that we are now examining, the Hero
makes his way, alive and intact, into a monster or into the belly
of a Goddess (who is at once Mother Earth and Goddess of Death) ;
and very often he succeeds in emerging unharmed. According to
some variants of the Kalevala, the sage Vainamoinen builds himself
a boat and, as the text puts it, “begins to row from one end of the
bowels to the other.” The giantess is finally forced to vomit him
up into the sea.’’^ Another Finnish myth relates the adventure of
the blacksmith Ilmarinen. A girl whom he is courting says that
she will marry him on condition that he will walk “along the sparse
teeth of the Old Hag of Hiisi.” Ilmarinen sets out to find the Hag;
when he goes near her, the sorceress swallows him. She tells him
to come out through her mouth, but Ilmarinen refuses. “I’ll make
my own door!” he answers, and with the smith’s tools that he has
made by magic, he breaks open the Hag’s stomach and so comes
out. According to another variant, the girl stipulated that Ilmarinen
should catch a huge fish. But the fish swallowed him. Refusing to
come out either “through his back hole” or “through his mouth,”
Ilmarinen jumped about in the fish’s belly until it burst.®

This mythical theme is enormously widespread, especially in
Oceania. We need cite only a Polynesian variant. The Hero
Nganaoa’s boat had been swallowed by a kind of whale, but the
hero seized the mast and thrust it into the monster’s mouth to
keep it open. He then went down into the monster’s belly, where
he found his two parents, still alive. Nganaoa lit a fire, killed the
whale, and emerged through its mouth.^

64 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

The sea monster’s belly, like the body of the chthonian Goddess,
represents the bowels of the earth, the realm of the dead, Hell.
In the visionary literature of the Middle Ages, Hell is frequently
imagined in the form of a huge monster, whose prototype is prob-
ably the biblical Leviathan. There is, then, a series of parallel
images: the belly of a giantess, of a Goddess, of a sea monster,
symbolizing the chthonian womb, cosmic night, the realm of the
dead. To enter this gigantic body alive is equivalent to descending
into Hell, to confronting the ordeals destined for the dead. The
initiatofy meaning of this type of descent to the Underworld is clear
— he who has been successful in such an exploit no longer fears
death; he has conquered a kind of bodily immortality, the goal of
all heroic initiations from the time of Gilgamesh.

But there is yet another element that we must take into ac-
count. The beyond is also the place of knowledge and of wisdom.
The Lord of Hell is omniscient; the dead know the future. In some
myths and sagas the Hero descends into Hell to gain wisdom or
to learn secret lore. Vainamoinen could not finish a boat that he
had created by magic because he lacked three words. To learn them,
he sets out in search of a famous wizard, Antero, a giant who for
years had lain motionless like a shaman in trance, so that a tree
had grown out of his shoulder and birds had made their nests in
his beard. Vainamoinen falls into the giant’s mouth and is quickly
swallowed. But once inside Antero’s stomach, he forges himself a
magic suit of iron and tells the wizard that he will stay there until
he has obtained the three magic words to finish his boat.^® Now,
what Vainamoinen does in flesh and blood the shaman does in
trance — that is, his spirit leaves his body and descends into the
Underworld. Sometimes this ecstatic journey into the beyond is
imagined as entry into the body of a fish or a sea monster. In a
Lapp legend, a shaman’s son wakes his father, who has been asleep
for a long time, with these words: “When will my father come
from the bend of the pike’s bowels, from the third curve of the
entrails?”^^ Why had the shaman undertaken this ecstatic journey
if not to obtain secret knowledge, the revelation of mysteries?

Initiatory Symbolism of the Symplegades

But the representation of the beyond as the bowels of Mother
Earth or the belly of a gigantic monster is only one among the
very many images that figure the Other World as a place that
can be reached only with the utmost difficulty. The “clashing

INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES

65

rocks,” the “dancing reeds,” the gates in the shape of jaws, the
“two razor-edged restless mountains,”^^ the “two clashing ice-
bergs,” the “active door,” the “revolving barrier,”^® the door made
of the two halves of the eagle’s beak, and many more^^ — all these
are images used in myths and sagas to suggest the insurmountable
difficulties of passage to the Other World. (The Symplegades were
two rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea that clashed together
intermittently, but remained apart when Jason and the Argonauts
passed through in the Argo,) Let us note that these images em-
phasize not only the danger of the passage — as in the myths of
entering a giantess’ or a sea monster’s body — ^but especially the
impossibility of imagining that the passage could be made by a
being of flesh and blood. The Symplegades show us the paradoxical
nature of passage into the beyond, or, more precisely, of transfer
from this world to a world that is transcendent. For although
originally the Other World is the world after death, it finally comes
to mean any transcendent state, that is, any mode of being inac-
cessible to fleshly man and reserved for “spirits” or for man as a
spiritual entity.

The paradox of this passage is sometimes expressed in spatial
as well as in temporal terms. According to the Jaiminiya Upanishad
Brahmana (I, 5, 5; I, 35, 7-9; IV, 15, 2-5), the gate of the world
of heavenly Light is to be found “where Sky and Earth embrace”
and the “Ends of the year” are united.^® In other words, no human
being can go there except '“in the spirit.” All these mythical images
and folklore motifs of the dangerous passage and the paradoxical
transfer express the necessity for a change in mode of being to
make it possible to attain to the world of spirit. As A. K. Coomaras-
wamy well put it: “What the formula states literally is that who-
ever would transfer from this to the Otherworld, or return, must
do so through the undimensioned and timeless ‘interval’ that divides
related but contrary forces, between which, if one is to pass at all,
it must be ‘instantly.’

Coomaraswamy’s interpretation is already a metaphysical ex-
egesis of the symbolism of the Symplegades; it presupposes becom-
ing conscious of the necessity for abolishing contraries; and, as we
know, gaining such a consciousness is amply documented in Indian
speculation and in mystical literature. But the interest of the
Symplegades lies above all in the fact that they constitute a sort
of prehistory of mysticism and metaphysics. In short, all these
images express the following paradox: to enter the beyond, to

66

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

attain to a transcendent mode of being, one must acquire the
condition of “spirit.” It is for this reason that the Symplegades
form part of an initiatory scenario. They fall in the class of the
ordeals that the Hero — or the dead man’s soul — must face in
order to enter the Other World.

As we saw, the Other World constantly enlarges its frontiers; it
signifies not only the land of the dead but also any enchanted and
miraculous realm, and, by extension, the divine world and the
transcendent plane. The vagina dentata can represent not only
passage into Mother Earth, but also the door of Heaven. In a
North American tale, this door is alternatively made of the “two
halves of the eagle’s beak” or of the vagina dentata of the Daughter
of the King of Heaven.^^ This is but one more demonstration that
mythical imagination and philosophical speculation have made
particularly good use of the initiatory structure of the Symplegades.
The Symplegades become in some sort “guardians of the threshold,”
homologizable with the monsters and grifBns that guard a treasure
hidden at the bottom of the sea, or a miraculous fountain from
which flows the Water of Youth, or a garden in the midst of which
stands the Tree of Life. It is as diflicult to enter the Garden of
the Hesperides as it is to pass between the clashing rocks or to
enter a monster’s belly. Each of these exploits constitutes a pre-
eminently initiatory ordeal. He who emerges from such an ordeal
victorious is qualified to share in a superhuman condition — ^he is a
Hero, omniscient, immortal.

Individual Imtiations: North America -^ ^/ / ' /

The myths, the symbols, and the images that we have just
reviewed belong, in large part, to individual initiations; and ^s,
of course, is why we find them documented especially in
heroic myths and in stories whose structure is shamanic — ^that is,
in narratives that recount the adventures of a person endowed
with extraordinary gifts. As we shall see later, initiations of warriors
and shamans are individual; and in their ordeals we can still
trace the archetypal scenario revealed by myths. But aside from
these initiations, which we might call specia^d, since they pre-
suppose an exceptional vocation or qualification, Aere are puberty
initiations which are likewise individual. This is the type character-
istic of the aboriginal societies of North America. The note peculiar
to North American puberty rites is, of course, the obtaining of a
tutelary spirit; hence what is involved is a personal quest and

INDIVIDUAL INITUTIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES

67

personal relations between the novice and his tutelary spirit. This
type of puberty initiation is of interest for our investigation from
several points of view. Above all, it shows us, more clearly than
other initiations, the importance of the novice’s religious experi-
ence; it is through obtaining his tutelary spirit that the novice
receives the revelation of the sacred and changes his existential
status. In addition, this type of individual puberty initiation enables
us to approach, on one side, the initiations of warriors and shamans
and, on the other, the rites for entrance into secret societies. Finally,
the North American documents bring out some initiatory motifs
which we have already noted elsewhere (in Australia, for example),
but which attain their true importance in the shamanic initiations
of central and northern Asia; I refer especially to the ritual ascent
of trees and sacred poles.

The characteristic element of North American initiations is
withdrawal into solitude. Between the ages of ten and sixteen years,
the boys isolate themselves in the mountains or the forest. Here
there is more than separation from the mother, which is character-
istic of all puberty rituals; there is a break with the community
of the living. The novice’s religious experience is brought on by
his immersion in the life of the cosmos and by his ascetic regime;
it is not directed by the presence and teaching of instructors. More
than in other types of puberty initiations, the novice’s introduction
to religious life is the result of a personal experience — the dreams
and visions provoked by a course of ascetic practices in solitude.
The novice fasts, especially for the first four days (an indication
of the archaism of the custom), purifies himself by repeated purges,
imposes dietary prohibitions on himself, and submits himself to
numerous ascetic exercises (e.g., steam bath or bath in icy water,
burns, scarifications). He sings and dances through the night, prays
at dawn to obtain a tutelary spirit. And it is after these prolonged
efforts that he receives the revelation of his spirit. Usually the spirit
makes its appearance in animal form, which confirms the cosmic
structure of the novice’s religious experience. More rarely, the
spirit is anthropomorphic (when it proves to be the soul of an
ancestor). The novice learns a song by virtue of which he remains
connected with his spirit throughout Ws life. Girls retire into sol-
itude on the occasion of their first menstruation; but for them it is
not absolutely necessary to obtain a tutelary spirit.^®

The same initiatory pattern recurs in the ceremonies for entrance
into secret societies (the Dancing Societies) and in shamanic

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RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

initiations. The distinctive note of all these North American initi-
ations is the belief that the tutelary spirit can be won by an ascetic
effort in the wilderness. The ascetic practices pursue the annihila-
tion of the novice’s secular personality, in other words, his initiatory
death; in many cases, this death is announced by the ecstasy, trance,
or pseudo-unconsciousness into which he falls. Like all other initia-
tions, these of North America — ^whether they are puberty cere-
monies or rites for entrance into secret or shamanic societies —
aim at the spiritual transmutation of the novice; but it is
important to emphasize the cosmic context of their scenarios. The
novice’s solitude in the wilderness is equivalent to a personal
discovery of the sacredness of the cosmos and of animal life. All
nature is revealed as a hierophany. The passage from secular
existence in the community during the nonliturgical summer season
to the existence sanctified by meeting with the Gods or spirits is
not made without peril. “Possessed” by the Gods or spirits, the
novice is in danger of completely losing his psychomental balance.
The raging fury of the candidates for the Kwakiutl Cannibal Society
is the best example of the danger that accompanies such a spiritual
transmutation. We will dwell for a moment on the initiations into
the Kwakiutl Dancing Societies; they quite clearly reveal the
structure of initiations into North American secret societies. Natur-
ally, I cannot here go into all the details of this extremely complex
phenomenon. I shall only mention such aspects of the initiation
as can contribute directly to our investigation.^®

Kwakiutl Dancing Societies

During the winter, that is, during the Sacred Time, when the
spirits are believed to return among the living, the social division
into clans is abolished, and in its place appears an organization
of a spiritual nature, represented by the Dancing Societies. The
men abandon their summer names and resume their sacred winter
names.^® During the Winter Ceremonial, the community relives
its myths of origin. The dances and pantomimes dramatically re-
produce the mythical events which, in the beginning, founded the
institutions of the Kwakiutl. The men incarnate the sacred per-
sonages, and as a result there is a complete regeneration of
society and the cosmos. This movement of universal regeneration
is the setting for the initiations of novices. The Dancing Societies
are divided into numerous hierarchic grades or Dances, each
constituting a closed unit. Some Societies have as many as fifty-

INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 69

three hierarchic degrees, but all members cannot reach the highest
degrees. The lower a Dance, the more members it has. The social
and economic situation of the candidate — or rather, of his family
— splays a role of the first importance. In the hamatsa Dance, for
example, the members are all chiefs of clans. Then, too, the initi-
atory ceremony is quite costly, for the candidate has to give
valuable presents to the participants. The right to become a
member of a Dancing Society is hereditary; consequently the
initiation is limited to such boys as are elegible. When the boys
reach the age of ten or twelve years, they are initiated into the
lower degree. It is these first entrance rites that here concern us.

Listening to the sound of the sacred instruments, the novice
falls into trance (the trance is sometimes simulated); this is the
sign that he is dying to profane life, that he is possessed by his
Spirit. He is either “carried off” into the forest (as in the case of
the Cannibal Society), or “ravished” to Heaven (the Dancing
Society of the Dluwulaxa or Mitia), or, finally, he remains shut
up in the ceremonial house (the Clown Society of Fort Rupert, or
the Wikeno Dancing Societies of the warriors and healers). All
these carryings off or ravishings find expression in a period of
solitude, and it is during this time that the novices are initiated
by the spirits. Among the Bella Bella and other tribes, each clan
has its own cave, in which the initiating spirit lives; it is in this
cave — whose symbolsm is now familar to us — that the initiation
takes place.^^ During his seclusion in the forest, the candidate for
the Cannibal Society is served by a woman; since he is identified
with the God, the woman impersonates the slave. She brings him
food and prepares a corpse for him, mummifying it in salt water.
The novice hangs it from the roof of his cabin, smokes it, and,
tearing strips from it, swallows them without chewing them.^^ This
cannibalism is proof of his identification with the God.

The all-important moment comes with the return of the novices
from the forest and their entrance into the ceremonial house, for
this house is an image of the world {imago mundi) and represents
the cosmos. To grasp the symbolism of the house, we must remem-
ber that, for the Kwakiutl, the umverse has three divisions — sky,
earth, and Other World. A copper pillar, symbolizing the axis of
the world, traverses these three regions at a central point, which
is the center of the world. According to the myths, men can mount
to Heaven or descend to Hell by climbing up or down a copper
ladder; upward, it leads to an opening, the Door to the World

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RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

Above. This copper pillar is- represented in the ceremonial house
by a cedar pole thirty or thirty-five feet high, the upper half of
which projects throu^ a hole in the roof. During the ceremonies
the novices sing: “I am at the Center of the World ... I am at the
post of the World! . . The house reproduces the cosmos, and
in the ceremonial songs it is called “Our World.” The ceremonies
take place, then, at the center of the visible universe; hence they
have a cosipic dimension and value.^^ The pole in the ceremoni^
house of the Cannibals sometimes bears a human image at its
summit, and so is identified not only with the cosmic pillar but
also with the cannibal spirit. As we shall see later, the central
pole plays quite an important role in North and South American
initiations; by climbing it, the novice reaches Heaven. For the
moment, and to confine ourselves to the Kwakiutl family, we may
note that among the Wikeno the novice is tied to the pole; he
struggles to free himself; and the uninitiated, watching from a
distance, seeing the pole violently shaken, believe that he is fighting
with the cannibal spirit. Among the Bella Bella, the novice climbs
the pole; among the Fort Rupert Kwakiutl, he climbs it to the
roof of the house, from which he jumps down among the
spectators and bites them.^®

Let us note this fact: the novice’s entry into the ceremonial
house is equivalent to his symbolic installation at the center of
the world. He now inhabits a sacred microcosm — sacred with the
sacrality that the world possessed at the moment of creation. In
such a sacred space, it is always possible to leave the earth, to
transcend it, and enter the world of the Gods. The back part of
the ceremonial house is separated from the remainder by a parti-
tion, on which the face of the patron spirit is painted. Among the
Cannibals, the door in this partition represents a bird’s beak. When
the novice enters the closed-off part, he is supposed to be swallowed
by the Bird.^® In other words, he flies to Heaven, for bird symbol-
ism is always connected with an ascension. TTie sound of the
flutes and other sacred instruments which have such a considerable
role in the Kwakiutl and Nootka secret rituals represents the
voices of birds.^*’^ The ascent to Heaven symbolized by the flight
of birds is characteristic of archaic culture; and probably the
rituals we have just been considering are among the oldest elements
of the Kwakiutl religion.

Shut up in the back part of the ceremonial house, the novices
continue to be possessed by the spirit of the Society, just as they
were when they were ravished to the forest. This possession is

INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 71

equivalent to the death of their individuality, which is dissolved
in the supernatural power. At a particular moment the novices,
sometimes wearing masks, come out from behind the partition
and join in the dances. They imitate the behavior of the Society’s
spirit by a mimicry that proclaims that they incarnate it. Identified
with the spirit, the novice is “out of his mind,” and an essential
part of the initiation ceremony consists precisely in attempts on
the part of the older memb^s of the Society to “tame” him by
dances and songs. The novice is progressively cured of the excess
of power acquired from the divine presence; he is directed toward
a new spiritual equilibrium, helped to establish a new personality,
qualitatively different from that which he possessed before en-
countering the divinity, but nevertheless a properly structured
personality, which will replace the psychic tumult of possession.
Duly exorcised, he takes his place in one of the lower degrees of the
Dancing Society. The ritual prohibitions are, of course, lifted only
progressively, toward the end of the Winter Time.

Among the Kwakiutl Dancing Societies, the Cannibal Society is
of the greatest interest for the historian of religion. The Kwakiutl
has a horror of human flesh. If the novice, sometimes with tre-
mendous difficulty, nevertheless succeeds in becoming a cannibal,
it is to give concrete evidence that he is no longer a human being;
that he has identified himself with the God. Like his “madness,”
his cannibalism is proof of his divinization. When he returns to the
village after a seclusion of three or four months, he acts like a beast
of prey — he jumps from the roof of the house, attacks all those
whom he encounters, bites their arms and swallows the morsels
of flesh. Four men are barely able to restrain him, and they try
to force him into the dancing house. The woman who had accom-
panied him into the solitude now appears and dances before him
naked, holding a corpse in her arms. Finally the novice climbs onto
the roof of the ceremonial house, from which he jumps down
through the displaced boards, to dance in ecstasy, trembling in
every limb. To tame him, the healer {heliga) seizes him by the
head and drags him to salt water. They go into the water until
it reaches their waists. The healer dips the hamatsa under water
four times. Every time he comes up again he cries **hapr Then
they go back to the house. The excitement has left him. He goes
home and drinks salt water to cause vomiting. The wild paroxysm
is followed by complete prostration, and during the following
nights he is silent and depressed at the dances.^® Like all the other
initiations into Kwakiutl secret brotherhoods, initiation into the

72

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

Cannibal Society is also the establishment of a new, integrated
personality; the novice has to find a modus vivendi with the sacred
power that he has acquired by incarnating the God.

The initiatory behavior of the Kwakiutl cannibal is of particular
interest for the historian of religion; the breakup of his personality,
his fury, his taming by the healer, are reminiscent of other religious
phenomena, documented in various cultures that have no historical
connections. Disintegration of personality and possession are symp-
toms common to many North American initiations; but when loss
of personality and possession occur with exceptional intensity,
they are the outstanding syndrome of shamanic vocation. For
this reason I shall reserve an analysis of the religious significance
of madness and initiatory sicknesses in general for the next chapter,
which will deal with shamanism. But the Kwakiutl cannibal exhibits
some special traits — for example, his homicidal fury, his behaving
like a beast of prey, his “heat,” which the healer reduces by baths.
Each of these expresses the fact that the human condition has been
transcended; that the novice has assimilated such a quantity of
sacred power that his secular mode of being has been abolished.
And we shall see that similar behavior occurs in other cultures,
when the novice, by passing through certain initiatory ordeals,
succeeds in transmuting his human existence into a higher. The
Scandinavian berserker “heats” himself in his initiatory combat,
shares in the sacred frenzy or furor (wut), behaves at once like a
beast of prey and a shaman; not only is he irresistible, he spreads
terror all around him. To behave like a beast of prey — ^wolf, bear,
leopard — ^betokens that one has ceased to be a man, that one in-
carnates a higher religious force, that one has in some sort become
a god. For we must not forget that, on the level of elemental
religious experience, the beast of prey represents a higher mode
of existence. As we shall see in the next chapter, assimilation of
sacred power is expressed in an excessive heating of the body;
extreme heat is one of the characteristic marks of magicians,
shamans, healers, mystics. In whatever cultural context it appears,
the syndrome of magical heat proclaims that the profane human
condition has been abolished and that one shares in a transcendent
mode of being, that of the Gods.

Men's Secret Societies

This superhuman mode of being is obtained through an increase
in magico-religious power. This is why, among the North American

INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 73

aborigines, there are such marked resemblances between puberty
initiations and rites for entrance into secret societies or shamanic
associations. All of these initiations undertake to conquer a sacred
power, and the conquest is proved either by obtaining one or
more tutelary spirits, by such exploits as those performed by
Indian fakirs, or by unusual behavior, such as cannibalism. Every-
where we decipher the same mystery of death to the secular condi-
tion, followed by resurrection to a higher mode of being. In North
America, shamanism has influenced the pattern of other initiations.
The reason is precisely that the shaman is pre-eminently the ex-
ample of the man endowed with extraordinary powers — that is,
he is in some sort, the exemplary model of all religious men. Very
probably we here have the explanation for the origin of secret
societies, especially those of men, not only in North America
but all over the world. The specialist in the sacred — the medicine
man, the shaman, the mystic — ^has been at once the model and
the stimulus for other men to increase their magico-religious
powers and their social prestige through repeated initiations.

The morphology of men’s secret societies is extremely complex
and I cannot here even outline their structures and history As
to their origin, the most generally accepted hypothesis is the one
originally suggested by Frobenius and revived by the historico-
cultural school."^® According to it, the male secret societies, or
Societies of Masks, were a creation of the matriarchal cycle; their
object was to terrify women, primarily by making them believe that
the masks were demons and ancestral spirits, to the end of under-
mining the economic, social, and religious supremacy of woman
which has been established by matriarchy. In this form, the hypoth-
esis seems to lack foundation. It is probable that the Societies of
Masks played a role in the struggle for male supremacy; but it is
hard to believe that the religious phenomenon of the secret society
is a result of matriarchy. On the contrary, we observe a perfect
continuity between puberty rites and rites for initiation into men’s
secret societies. Throughout Oceania^ for example, both initiations
of boys and those requisite for membership in the men’s secret
societies involve the same ritual of symbolic death through being
swallowed by a sea monster, followed by resurrection — ^which
proves that all the ceremonies derive historically from a single
center.®^ In West Africa, we find a similar phenomenon; the secret
societies derive from the puberty initiations.®^ And it would be easy
to lengthen the list of examples.®®

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RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

What, in my view, is original and fundamental in the phenom-
enon of secret societies is the need for a fuller participation in the
sacred, the desire to live as intensely as possible the sacrality
peculiar to each of the two sexes. This is the reason why initiation
into secret societies so much resembles the initiatory rites of
puberty. We find the same ordeals, the same symbols of death
and resurrection, the same revelation of a traditional and secret
doctrine — and we find them because this initiatory scenario is
the sine. qua non for a new and more complete experience of the
sacred. There are, however, some innovations peculiar to the
masked secret societies. The most important of these are the
following: the primary role of secrecy, the cruelty of the initiatory
ordeals, the predominance of the cult of Ancestors (personified
by the masks), and the absence of the Supreme Being in the
ceremonies. We have already had occasion to note the Supreme
Being’s progressive loss of importance in Australian puberty rites.
In the secret societies, this phenomenon is general; the place of
the Supreme Being is taken by a demiurgic God, or by the mythical
Ancestor, or by a civilizing Hero. But as we shall soon see, some
initiations into secret societies continue to employ rites and symbols
of celestial ascent, which proves, I think, the importance of the
supreme Celestial Beings whose place, in the course of time, has
been taken by other divine or semidivine figures.

The socioreligious phenomenon of secret male cults and con-
fraternities of masks is especially widespread in Melanesia and
Africa.®^ As an example, I will cite the initiation into the Kuta
secret confraternity of the Ngoye (Ndassa), which is reserved
only for heads of clans.^® The adepts are beaten with a thong of
panther hide, tied to a horizontal beam about three feet above the
surface of the ground, rubbed with urticaceous leaves, and their
bodies and hair are covered with an ointment made from a plant
that produces terrible itching. We may note in passing that being
beaten or rubbed with nettles is a rite that symbolizes the candi-
date’s initiatory dismemberment, his death at iht hands of demons.
We find the same symbolism and the same rites in shamanic
initiations.^^ Another ordeal “consists in making the adept climb
a tree fifteen to twenty feet tall, where he has to drink a medicine.”^'’^
When the novice returns to the village, he is received by the
women with lamentations; they weep as if he were dying. Among
other Kuta tribes, the novice is severely beaten, which is said to
“kill” his old name so that he may be given another.^^ These rites

INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 75

need no further comment; as in the puberty initiations, we here
have a symbolic death and resurrection, involving an ascent to
Heaven and the beginning of a new, consecrated existence.

The Mandja and Banda tribes have a society named NgakolaP
According to the myth that the novices are told at their initiation,
Ngakola lived on earth long ago, in the bush. His body was black
and covered with hair. He could kill a man and then bring him to
life again, better than before. So he said to the people: “Send
me men. I will swallow them and vomit them up renewed.” The
people obeyed. But Ngakola disgorged only half of the men he had
swallowed; so the people killed him. This myth institutes and
justifies the rituals of the secret society. A flat sacred stone plays a
great part in the initiation ceremonies; according to tradition,
this sacred stone was taken from Ngakola’s belly. The novice
enters a house symbolizing the monster’s body. There he hears
Ngakola’s lugubrious voice, there he undergoes tortures; for he is
told that he “has now entered Ngakola’s belly,” and is being
digested. The initiates sing in chorus: “Ngakola, take our entrails;
Ngakola, take our livers!”^® After other ordeals, the initiatory
master finally announces that Ngakola, who had swallowed the
novice, has vomited him up.

Here we have again what we had already found in Australia —
the myth of a semidivine monster who was killed by men because
he disgorged only some of the people he had swallowed, and who
after his death was made the center of a secret cult whose purpose
is initiatory death and resurrection. We also find again the symbol-
ism of death through being swallowed by a monster and entering
its belly, a symbolism which plays so large a part in puberty
initiations. Let us note once again that rites for entrance into
secret societies correspond in every way to tribal initiations: e.g.,
seclusion, initiatory ordeals and tortures, bestowal of a new name,
revelation of a secret doctrine, instruction in a special language.
This comes out even more clearly in the description that a Belgian
missionary, Leo Bittremieux, has given of the secret society of
the Bakhimba, in Mayombe.^^ The initiatory ordeals continue for
from two to five years, and the most important is a ceremony of
death and resurrection. The novice must be “killed.” The per-
formance takes place at night, and the old initiates sing the lament
of the mothers and relatives for those who are to die. The candidate
is beaten and drinks a narcotic potion called the drink of death,
but he also eats calabash seeds, which symbolize intelligence^^ —

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RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

a significant detail, for it shows us that initiatory death is the road
to wisdom. The candidate is held by the hand, and one of the old
men spins him around until he falls to the ground. Then all cry:
“Oh, so-and-so is dead!” A native informant adds that “the dead
man is rolled along the ground, while the chorus sing a funeral
chant: ‘He is dead! Ah, he is dead indeed ... I shall never see
him again!’ ” In the village, his mother, brother, and sister mourn
him in the same fashion.^^ Then the initiated relatives of the
“dead” men take them on their backs and carry them to a con-
secrated enclosure called the court of resurrection. There they
are laid, stark naked, in a cross-shaped ditch, where they remain
until dawn on the day of “commutation” or resurrection, the first
day of the native week, which has only four.^^ The novices’ heads
are then shaved; they are beaten, thrown on the ground, and
finally resuscitated by having a few drops of a peppery liquid
dropped into their eyes and nostrils. But before their resurrection
they have taken an oath of absolute secrecy: “All that I shall see
here I will tell to no one, neither woman, man, noninitiate, nor
Whiteman; otherwise, make me swell up, kill me.”^^ The same
pattern of initiation is easily recognizable in many other African
secret societies.^®

There is no need of multiplying examples to show, on the one
hand, the continuity between puberty rites and initiations into
secret societies, and, on the other hand, the constant increase in
the severity of the ordeals. Initiatory torture is characteristic of
the Melanesian secret societies and of some North American con-
fraternities. The ordeals through which the Mandan novices
had to pass, for example, are famous for their cruelty.^*^ To under-
stand the meaning of initiatory torture, we must bear in mind that
suffering has a ritual value; the torture is supposed to be inflicted
by superhuman beings, and its goal is the spiritual transmutation
of the initiand. Extreme suffering is likewise an expression of
initiatory death. Certain serious illnesses, especially psychomental
disorders, are regarded as the sign that superhuman beings
have chosen the sick man to be initiated — ^that is, tortured, dis-
membered, and “killed,” so that he may be resuscitated to a higher
existence. As we shall see in the next chapter, initiatory sicknesses
are one of the principal syndromes of the shamanic vocation. The
tortures of the candidates for secret societies are the homologue
of the terrible sufferings that symbolize the mystical death of the

INDIVIDUAL INITIATIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 77

future shaman. In both cases, there is a process of spiritual trans-
mutation.

Initiatory Motifs Common to Puberty Rites and Secret Societies

So much for the severity of the ordeals. As for the continuity of
initiatory motifs, we have already seen how insistently the theme
of the swallowing monster recurs, not only in puberty rites and in
initiations into secret societies, but also in other mythico-ritual
contexts. But there are yet other archetypal motifs that recur in
various types of initiations, notably the ritual climbing of trees or
sacred poles. We have already encountered examples of this in
Australian, African, and North American initiations. The meaning
of this climbing rite will become completely clear only when we
come to study the initiations and ecstatic techniques of the shamans
of northern and central Asia. But the ceremonial climbing of trees
and poles is also documented in other cultural zones besides Asia,
and in other religious contexts besides shamanism. To confine our-
selves to the two American continents, a tree or a sacred pole plays
important roles not only in puberty initiations (as, for example, in
the north of the Gran Chaco, among the Chamacoco and Vilela
tribes, among the Mandan, the Kwakiutl, the Porno but also
in public festivals (Ge festival of the sun, various festivals
among the Tupi, the Plains Indians, the Selish, the Lenape, the
Maidu),^® or in the ceremonies and healing seances of shamans
(Yaruro, Araucanian, Maidu).®® The novice during his initiation,
or the shaman in the course of the seance, climbs the tree or the
sacred pole; and despite the variety of socioreligious contexts in
which it occurs, the ascent always has the same goal — meeting
with the Gods or heavenly powers, in order to obtain a blessing
(whether a personal consecration, a favor for the community, or
the cure of a sick person). In a number of cases, the original mean-
ing of the climb — symbolic ascent to Heaven — seems to have been
lost, yet the rite continues to be performed, for the memory of
celestial sacrality remains even when the Celestial Beings have
been completely forgotten.

Professor Josef Haeckel has shown that the rite and symbolism
of the sacred pole were probably brought to South America by
waves of hunter-culture peoples from North America; that, conse-
quently, we here have an archaic religious element which, in addi-
tion, displays an astonishing similarity to the cosmologies of
central and northern Asia.®^ Now in Asia the sacred pole or tree

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RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

symbolizes the Cosmic Tree, the axis mundi, and they are sup-
posed to stand at the center of the world; by climbing his tree,
the shaman ascends to Heaven. As we saw, the same cosmological
concept and the same meaning of ascent are found among the
Kwakiutl. This raises the whole problem of the historical connec-
tions between the North American mythico-ritual complex and the
Asian complex; but I cannot enter into it here.®^ What I should
like to stress is the following fact: ascending to Heaven represents
one of the oldest religious means of personally communicating with
the Gods, and hence of fully participating in the sacred in order to
transcend the human condition. Ascent and flight are proofs par
excellence of the divinization of man. The specialists in the sacred
— ^medicine men, shamans, mystics — are above all men who are be-
lieved to fly up to Heaven, in ecstasy or even in the flesh. This theme
will engage our attention in the next chapter; but we are now in
a position to understand why it is present in certain puberty initia-
tions and in the ceremonies for entrance into secret societies: the
candidate symbolically goes up to Heaven in order to take unto
himself the very source of the sacred, to transmute his ontological
status, and to make himself like the archetype of homo religiosus,
the shaman.

The initiatory theme of ascent to Heaven differs radically from
that of the swallowing monster; but although, in all probability,
they originally belonged to different types of culture, we today
often find them together in the same religion; even more, the
two themes sometimes meet during the initiation of a single indi-
vidual. The reason is not far to seek — the descent to the Under-
world and the ascent to Heaven obviously denote different religious
experiences; but the two experiences spectacularly prove that he
who has undergone them has transcended the secular condition of
humanity and that his behavior is purely that of a spirit.

I shall say only a few words about the secret associations of
women. Where we find them to be organizations involving complex
and dramatic entrance rites, we may suspect imitation of certain
external aspects of the male secret societies. Such is the case,
for example, with the secret female cult of the Pangwe, a compara-
tively recent imitation of the men’s societies.®® It is likewise prob-
able that initiation into the Nyembe association in Gabun has been
influenced by certain rituals peculiar to the men’s secret societies.
The initiation is extremely complicated, but it includes a dance in
the course of which one of the directresses, symbolizing a leopard,

INDIVIDUAL INITUTIONS AND SECRET SOCIETIES 79

attacks and “kills” the novices; finally the other directress likewise
“kills” the leopard and frees the novices from its belly.®^ This
ritual motif is bound up with hunting and, consequently, properly
belongs to men. Among the Mordvins there is a secret women’s
society whose emblem is a hobbyhorse and whose members are
called “horses”; around their necks they wear a purse full of millet,
representing the horse’s belly.®® All this symbolism of the horse
shows the infiuence of male military organizations.

But these influences of male religious feeling and symbolism on
the morphology of female secret societies must not be allowed to
lead us into the error of believing that the entire phenomenon
represents something late and hybrid. The influences have been
exercised chiefly on the external organization of female societies,
and in many cases quite late, after the secrets of some male con-
fraternities were no longer strictly kept. But the phenomenon of
the female secret society cannot be reduced to a process of imita-
tion. It is women’s particular and peculiar experience which ex-
plains their desire to organize themselves in closed associations in
order to celebrate the mysteries of conception, of birth, of fecundity,
and, in general, of universal fertility. This is clear even in the ex-
amples just cited. In the Kuta Lisimba society, which is almost
identical with the Nyembe society, at a certain moment the woman
directing the ceremony breaks an egg on the roof of the initiatory
hut “to ensure the hunters a plentiful harvest of game.”®® Among
the Mordvins, the young married women, when they reach the
house where the society’s ritual banquet is held, are struck three
times with whips by the old women, who cry: “Lay an egg!” and
the young married women produce a boiled egg from between their
breasts.®^ There is no need to go into the complex symbolism of
the egg here; but it is obvious that, in these contexts, the egg sig-
nifies fertility. Even the lubricious and orgiastic elements, and the
crude and obscene language, which are characteristic of female
ceremonial gatherings can finally be explained by a ritual goal —
ensuring fecundity.®®

Just as the men’s secret societies terrorize women, the women
insult, threaten, and even strike the men whom they encounter in
the course of their frenzied processions. Such behavior is ritually
justified; these are women’s mysteries, whose results might be en-
dangered by the presence of men. This is confirmed by the fact
that while they are gardening — an activity which is reserved for
them alone — ^Trobriand women have the right to attack and knock

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down any man who comes too close to their gardens.®^ We have
already had occasion to note the tension that exists between groups
of girls and young women working together at a specific craft and
groups of young men who attack them and try to destroy their
instruments,®® In the final analysis, the tension is always between
two different kinds of sacrality, which are the foundations of two dif-
ferent and polar world views — masculine and feminine. It is in this
specificity of the female religious experience that we must look to
find the primordial motive for the crystallization of secret groups
exclusively for women. Now the pre-eminent religious experience
of woman is that of the sanctity of life and the mystery of child-
bearing and universal fecundity. Women’s cult associations have
as their purpose ensuring full and unhampered participation in
this cosmic sacrality; and woman’s initiation par excellence is her
introduction to the mystery of generation, primordial symbol of
spiritual regeneration.

The tension between two kinds of sacrality implies both the
antagonism between two magics — ^feminine and masculine — and
their reciprocal attraction. Particularly on the levels of archaic
culture, we know that men are fascinated by the “secrets” of
women and vice versa. Psychologists have accorded great im-
portance to the fact that primitives are jealous of “women’s mys-
teries,” especially of menstruation and the ability to give birth.
But they have failed to bring out the complementary phenomenon
— ^women’s jealousy of men’s magics and lores (e.g., hunting magic,
secret lore concerning the Supreme Beings, shamanism and tech-
niques of ascent to Heaven, relations with the dead). If men in
their secret rites have made use of symbols and behaviors proper
to the condition of woman (e.g., the symbolism of initiatory birth),
women too, as we have just seen, have borrowed masculine symbols
and rituals. This ambivalent behavior in respect to the mysteries
of the opposite sex constitutes a problem of the first importance
for the psychologist. But the historian of religion considers only the
religious significations of a type of behavior. What he discerns in
the antagonism and attraction between two types of sacralities —
feminine and masculine — is above all a strong and essentially re-
ligious desire to transcend an apparently irreducible existential
situation and attain to a total mode of being.

CHAPTER V

Heroic and Shamanic Initiations

Going Berserk

In a passage that has become famous, the Ynglingasaga sets the
comrades of Odin before us: “They went without shields, and
were mad as dogs or wolves, and bit on their shields, and were as
strong as bears or bulls; men they slew, and neither fire nor steel
would deal with them; and this is what is called the fury of the
berserker.”^ This mythological picture has been rightly identified
as a description of real men’s societies — the famous Manner-
biinde of the ancient Germanic civilization. The berserkers were,
literally, the “warriors in shirts {serkr) of bear.”^ This is as much
as to say that they were magically identified with the bear. In
addition they could sometimes change themselves into wolves and
bears. A man became a berserker as the result of an initiation that
included specifically martial ordeals. So, for example, Tacitus tells
us that among the Chatti the candidate cut neither his hair nor his
beard until he had killed an enemy.® Among the Taifali, the youth
had to bring down a boar or a wolf; among the Heruli, he had to
fight unarmed.^ Through these ordeals, the candidate took to him-
self a wild-animal mode of being; he became a dreaded warrior in
the measure in which he behaved like a beast of prey. He meta-
morphosed himself into a superman because he succeeded in assimi-
lating the magicoreligious force proper to the carnivora.

The Volsunga Saga has preserved the memory of certain ordeals
typical of the initiations of berserkers. By treachery, King Siggeir
obtains possession of his nine brothers-in-law, the Volsungs.

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Chained to a beam, they are all eaten by a she-wolf, except Sig-
mund, who is saved by a ruse of his sister Signy. Hidden in a hut
in the depths of the forest, where Signy brings him food, he awaits
the hour of revenge. When her first two sons have reached the age
of ten, Signy sends them to Sigmund to be tested. Sigmund finds
that they are cowards, and by his advice Signy kills them. As the
result of her incestuous relations with her brother, Signy has a
third son, Sinf jotli. When he is nearly ten, his mother submits him
to a first ordeal: she sews his shirt to his arms through the skin.
Siggeir’s sons, submitted to the same ordeal, had howled with pain,
but Sinfjotli remains imperturbable. His mother then pulls off his
shirt, tearing away the skin, and asks him if he feels anything. The
boy answers that a Volsung is not troubled by such a trifle. His
mother then sends him to Sigmund, who submits him to the same
ordeal that Siggeir’s two sons had failed to sustain: he orders him
to make bread from a sack of flour in which there is a snake. When
Sigmund comes home that night, he finds the bread baked and asks
Sinfjotli if he did not find anything in the flour. The boy answers that
he remembers having seen something, but he paid no attention to
it and kneaded everything up together. After this proof of courage
Sigmund takes the boy into the forest with him. One day they find
two wolfskins hanging from the wall of a hut. The two sons of a
king had been transformed into wolves and could only come out
of the skins every tenth day. Sigmund and Sinfjotli put on the skins,
but caimot get them off. They howl like wolves and understand
the wolves’ language. They then separate, agreeing that they will
not call on each other for help unless they have to deal with more
than seven men. One day Sinfjotli is summoned to help and kUls all
the men who had attacked Sigmund. Another time, Sinfjotli him-
self is attacked by eleven men, and kills them without summoning
Sigmund to help him. Then Sigmund rushes at him and bites him in
the throat, but not long afterward finds a way to cure the wound.
Finally they return to Sieir cabin to await the moment when they
can put off their wolfskins. When the time comes, they throw the
skins into the fire. With this episode, Sinfjotli’s initiation is com-
pleted, and he can avenge the slaying of the Volsungs.'*

The initiatory themes here are obvious: the test of courage, re-
sistance to physical suffering, followed by magical transformation
into a wolf. But the compiler of the Volsunga Saga was no longer
aware of the original meaning of the transformation. Sigmund and
Sinfjotli find the skins by chance and do not know how to put them

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off. Now transformation into a wolf — ^that is, the ritual donning of
a wolfskin — constituted the essential moment of initiation into a
men’s secret society. By putting on the skin, the initiand assimilated
the behavior of a wolf; in other words, he became a wild-beast
warrior, irresistible and invulnerable. “Wolf” was the appellation
of the members of the Indo-European military societies.

The scenario of heroic initiations has been traced in other sagas.
For example, in the Saga of Grettir the Strong, the hero goes down
into a funeral barrow which contains a precious treasure and fights
successively with a ghost, with twelve berserkers, and with a bear.®
In the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, Bohdvar kills a winged monster and
then initiates his young protege Hottri by giving him a piece of the
monster’s heart to eat.*^

Unfortunately, there is not time to dwell on the sociology, the
mythology, and the rituals of the Germanic men’s associations,
which have been so brilliantly studied by Lily Weiser, Otto Hoffler,
and Georges Dumezil;® or on the other Indo-European men’s so-
cieties, such, for example, as the mairya of the Indo-Iranians, which
have formed the subject of important works by Stig Wikander
and G. Widengren.® I will only mention that the behavior of the
Indo-European warrior bands offers certain points of resemblance
to the secret fraternities of primitive societies. In both alike, the
members of the group terrorize women and noninitiates and in
some sort exercise a “right of rapine,” a custom which, in diluted
form, is still found in the popular traditions of Europe and the
Caucasus.^® Rapine, and especially cattle stealing, assimilate the
members of the warrior band to carnivora. In the Germanic
Wutende Heer, or in similar ritual organizations, the barking of
dogs (equals wolves) forms part of an indescribable uproar into
which all sorts of strange sounds enter, for example, bells and
trumpets. These sounds play an important ritual role; they help
prepare for the frenzied ecstasy of the members of the group.^^ As
we have already seen, in primitive cultures the sound of the bull-
roarers is believed to be the voice of Supernatural Beings; hence it
is the sign of their presence among the initiates. In the Germanic or
Japanese men’s secret societies the strange sounds, like the masks,
attest the presence of the Ancestors, the return of the souls of the
dead. The fundamental experience is provoked by the initiates’
meeting with the dead, who return to earth more especially about
the winter solstice. Winter is also the season when the initiates
change into wolves. In other words, during the winter the members

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of the band are able to transmute their profane condition and
attain to a superhuman existence, whether by consorting with the
Ancestors or by appropriating the behavior, that is the magic, of
the carnivora.

The martial ordeal par excellence was the single combat, con-
ducted in such a way that it finally roused the candidate to the
“fury of the berserkers.” For not military prowess alone was
involved. A youth did not become a berserker simply through
courage, physical strength, endurance, but as the result of a magico-
leligious experience that radically changed his mode of being. The
young warrior must transmute his humanity by a fit of aggressive
and terror-striking fury, which assimilated him to the raging beast
of prey. He became “heated” to an extreme degree, flooded by a
mysterious, nonhuman, and irresistible force that his fi g ht in g effort
and vigor summoned from the utmost depths of his being. The
ancient Germans called this sacred force wut, a term that Adam
von Bremen translated by furor; it was a sort of demonic frenzy,
which filled the warrior’s adversary with terror and finally para-
lyzed him. jjje ifjsij fg^g (literally “anger”), the homeric menos,
are almost exact equivalents of this same terrifying sacred expe-
rience peculiar to heroic combats.i® J. Vendryesi* and Marie-Louise
Sjoestedti® have shown that certain names applied to the Hero in
Old Irish refer to “ardor, excitation, turgescence.” As Miss Sjoes-
tedt writes, “The Hero is the man in fury, possessed by his own
tumultuous and burning energy. ”i®

Cuchulainn’s Initiation

The saga of the initiation of the young hero Cuchulainn ad-
mirably illustrates the eruption of this “tumultuous and burning
energy.” According to the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualnge, Cuchulainn,
nephew of Conchobar king of Ulster, one day overheard his master,
the druid Cathba, saying: “The little boy that takes arms this day
shall be splendid and renowned for deeds of arms . . . but he
shall be short-lived and fleeting.” Cuchulainn sprang up and, ask-
ing his uncle for arms and a chariot, set off for the castle of the
three sons of Necht, the worst enemies of the kingdom of Ulster.
Although these heroes were supposed to be invincible, the little
boy conquered them and cut off their heads. But the exploit heated
him to such a degree that a witch warned the king that if precau-
tions were not taken, the boy would kill all the warriors in Ulster.
The king decided to send a troop of naked women to meet

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85

Cuchulaiim. And the text continues: “Thereupon the young women
all arose and marched out . . . and they discovered their nakedness
and all their shame to him. The lad hid his face from them and
turned his gaze on the chariot, that he might not see the nakedness
or the shame of the women. Then the lad was lifted out of the
chariot. He was placed in three vats of cold water to extinguish his
wrath; and the first vat into which he was put burst its staves and
its hoops like the cracking of nuts around him. The next vat into
which he went boiled with bubbles as big as fists therein. The third
vat into which he went, some men might endure it and others might
not. Then the boy’s wrath (ferg) went down . . . and his festive
garments were put on him.”^^

Although “fictionized,” the saga of Cuchulaiim constitutes an
excellent document for Indo-European military initiations. As
Georges Dumezil has well shown, the lad’s battle with the three
macNechts represents an ancient Indo-European initiatory scenario
— the fight with three adversaries or with a three-headed monster.^®
But it is especially Cuchulainn’s wrath (/^rg), his berserker fury,
that is of interest for our investigation. Dumezil^® had already com-
pared Cuchulainn’s initiatory heating, and his subsequent taming
by the sight of women’s nakedness and cold water, with certain
moments in the initiation of the Kwakiutl cannibal. For, as we have
seen, the frenetic and homicidal madness of the young Kwakiutl
initiate is “treated” by a woman dancing naked before him with a
corpse in her arms, and especially by submerging his head in a
basin of salt water. Like the heat of the cannibal, the wrath of the
young warrior, which manifests itself in extreme heat, is a magico-
religious experience; there is nothing profane or natural in it — it
is the syndrome of gaining possession of a sacrality.

Symbolism of Magical Heat

There are reasons for believing that we are here in the presence
of a magicoreligious experience that is extremely archaic. For many
primitives think of the magicoreligious power as “burning,” and
express it by terms meaning heat, burn, very hot. It is for the same
reason that shamans and medicine men drink salt or highly spiced
water and eat aromatic plants — ^they expect thus to increase their
inner heat.^® That this magical heat corresponds to a real experience
is proved by the great resistance to cold displayed both by shamans
of the Arctic and Siberia and by Himalayan ascetics. In addition,
shamans are held to be “masters over fire” — ^for example, they

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swallow burning coals, touch red-hot iron, walk on fire.®^ Similar
experiences and conceptions are also documented among more
civilized peoples. The Sanskrit term tapas finally developed the
sense of ascetic effort in general, but its original meaning was ex-
treme heat. It was by becoming heated through asceticism that
Prajapati created the universe; he created it by a magic sweat, as
in some North American cosmogonies. The Dhammapada (387)
says that the Buddha is “burning,” and Tantric texts assert that
the awakening of the kundalini is manifested by a burning.®® In
modern India, the Mohammedans believe that a man in communi-
cation with God becomes “burning hot.” Anyone who performs
miracles is called “boiling.” By extension, all kinds of people or
acts involving any magicoreligious power are regarded as burning.®®
This sacred power, which causes both the shaman’s heat and the
heating of the warrior, can be transformed, differentiated, given
various colorings, by subsequent efforts. The Indian word Kratu,
which had begun by denoting the “energy peculiar to the ardent
warrior, specifically Indra,” and then “victorious force, heroic
force and ardor, courage, love of combat,” and by extension power
and majesty in general, finally came to mean the “force of the pious
man, which enables him to follow the prescriptions of the rta and
to attain happiness.”®^ The “wrath” and the heat induced by a
violent and excessive access of sacred power are feared by the ma-
jority of mankind. The term shanti, which in Sanskrit designates
tranquillity, peace of soul, freedom from the passions, relief from
suffering, derives from the root sham, which originally had the
meaning of extinguishing the fire, the anger, the fever, in short the
heat, provoked by demonic powers.®®

We are, then, in the presence of a fundamental magico-religious
experience, which is universally documented on the archaic levels
of culture: access to sacrality is manifested, among other things,
by a prodigious increase in heat. There is not space to dwell on
this important problem and to show, for example, the intimate rela-
tion between the techniques and mystiques of fire — a relation shown
by the close connections between smiths, shamans, and warriors.®®
I must add only that mastery over fire finds its expression equally
in “inner heat” and in insensibility to the temperature of hot coals.
From the viewpoint of the history of religion, these different ac-
complishments show that the human condition has been abolished
and that the shaman, the smith, or the warrior participate, each on
his own plane, in a higher condition. For this higher condition can

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87

be that of a God, that of a spirit, or that of an animal. The respective
initiations, though following different paths, pursue the same end
— ^to make the novice die to the human condition and to resuscitate
him to a new, a transhuman existence. Naturally, in military initia-
tions the initiatory death is less clearly seen than in shamanic
initiations, since the young warrior’s principal ordeal consists pre-
cisely in vanquishing his adversary. But he emerges from the ordeal
victorious only by becoming heated and attaining to the berserker
fury — symptoms that express death to the human condition. He
who obtains magical heat vividly demonstrates that he belongs to
a superhuman world.

Shamanic Initiations

We now come to shamanic initiations. To simplify the exposition,
I shall use the term shaman in its most general meaning.-^ We shall,
then, be considering not only shamanism in the strict sense, as it
has developed principally in northern and central Asia and in North
America, but also the various categories of medicine men and
wizards who flourish in other primitive societies.

There are three ways of becoming a shaman: first, by spon-
taneous vocation (the “call” or “election”); second, by hereditary
transmission of the shamanic profession; and, third, by person^
“quest,” or, more rarely, by the will of the clan. But, by whatever
method he may have been designated, a shaman is recognized as
such only after having received two kinds of instruction. The first
is ecstatic (e.g., dreams, visions, trances); the second is traditional
(e.g., shamanic techniques, names and functions of the spirits,
mythology and genealogy of the clan, secret language). 2® This
twofold teaching, imparted by the spirits and the old master
shamans, constitutes initiation. Sometimes initiation is public and
includes a rich and varied ritual; this is the case, for example,
among some Siberian peoples. But the lack of a ritual of this sort
in no way implies the lack of an initiation; it is perfectly possible
for the initiation to be performed in the candidate’s dreams or
ecstatic experiences.

It is primarily with the syndrome of the shaman’s mystical voca-
tion that we are concerned. In Siberia, the youth who is called to
be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior; for example,
he seeks solitude, becomes absent-minded, loves to roam in the
woods or unfrequented places, has visions, and sings in his sleep.^®
In some instances this period of incubation is marked by quite

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serious symptoms; among the Yakut, the young man sometimes
has fits of fury and easily loses consciousness, hides in the forest,
feeds on the bark of trees, throws himself into water and fire, cuts
himself with knives.^® The future shamans among the Tungus, as
they approach maturity, go through a hysterical or hysteroid crisis,
but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age — ^the
boy runs away into the mountains and remains there for a week or
more, feeding on animals, which he tears to pieces with his teeth.
He returns to the village, filthy, bloodstained, his clothes torn and
his hair disordered, and it is only after ten or more days have
passed that he begins to babble incoherent words.®^

Even in the case of hereditary shamanism, the future shaman’s
election is preceded by a change in behavior. The souls of the
shaman ancestors of a family choose a young man among their
descendants; he becomes absent-minded and moody, delights in
solitude, has prophetic visions, and sometimes undergoes attacks
that make him unconscious. During these times, the Buriat believe,
the young man’s soul is carried away by spirits; received in the
palace of the gods, it is instructed by his shaman ancestors in the
secrets of the profession, the forms and names of the Gods, the
worship and names of the spirits. It is only after this first initiation
that the youth’s soul returns and resumes control of his body.®^

A man may also become a shaman following an accident or a
highly unusual event — for example, among the Buriat, the Soyot,
the Eskimos, after being struck by lightning, or falling from a high
tree, or successfully undergoing an ordeal that can be homologized
with an initiatory ordeal, as in the case of an Eskimo who spent
five days in icy water without his clothes becoming wet.®®

The strange behavior of future shamans has not failed to attract
the attention of scholars, and from the middle of the past century
several attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon of
shamanism as a mental disorder.®^ But the problem was wrongly
put. For, on the one hand, it is not true that shamans always are
or always have to be neuropathies; on the other hand, those among
them who had been ill became shamans precisely because they had
succeeded in becoming cured. Very often in Siberia, when the
shamanic vocation manifests itself as some form of illness or as
an epileptic seizure, the initiation is equivalent to a cure. To obtain
the gift of shamanizing presupposes precisely the solution of the
psychic crisis brought on by the first symptoms of election or call.
But if shamanism cannot simply be identified with a psycho-

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89

pathological phenomenon, it is nevertheless true that the shamanic
vocation often implies a crisis so deep that it sometimes borders on
madness. And since the youth cannot become a shaman until he
has resolved this crisis, it is clear that it plays the role of a mystical
initiation. The disorder provoked in the future shaman by the
agonizing news that he has been chosen by the gods or the spirits
is by that very fact valuated as an initiatory sickness. The precar-
iousness of life, the solitude and the suffering, that are revealed
by any sickness are, in this particular case, aggravated by the sym-
bolism of initiatory death; for accepting the supernatural election
finds expression in the feeling that one has delivered oneself over
to the divine or demonic powers, hence that one is destined to
imminent death. We may give all these psychopathological crises
of the elected the generic name of initiatory sicknesses because
their syndrome very closely follows the classic ritual of initiation.
The sufferings of the elected man are exactly like the tortures of
initiation; just as, in puberty rites or rites for entrance into a secret
society, the novice is “killed” by semidivine or demonic Beings,
so the future shaman sees in dreams his own body dismembered
by demons; he watches them, for example, cutting off his head
and tearing out his tongue. The initiatory rituals peculiar to Siberian
and central Asian shamanism include a symbolic ascent to Heaven
up a tree or pole; in dream or a series of waking dreams, the sick
man chosen by the Gods or spirits undertakes his celestial journey
to the World Tree. I shall later give some examples of these initia-
tory ordeals undergone in dream or during the future shaman’s
period of apparent unconsciousness and madness.

But I should like even now to stress the fact that the psycho-
pathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane; it does not
belong to ordinary symptomatology. Jt has an initiatory structure
and signification; in short, it reproduces a traditional mystical
pattern. The total crisis of the future shaman, sometimes leading
to complete disintegration of the personality and to madness, can
be valuated not only as an initiatory deatih but also as a sym-
bolic return to the precosmogonic Chaos, to the amorphous and
indescribable state that precedes any cosmogony. Now, as we know,
for archaic and traditional cultures, a symbolic return to Chaos
is equivalent to preparing a new Creation.®® It follows that we may
interpret the psychic Chaos of the future shaman as a sign that the
profane man is being “dissolved” and a new personality being pre-
pared for birth.

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Initiatory Ordeals of Siberian Shamans

Let us now find out what Siberian shamans themselves have to
tell about the ordeals that they undergo during their initiatory sick-
nesses. They all maintain that they “die” and lie inanimate for
from three to seven days in their yiirt or in a solitary place. During
this time, they are cut up by demons or by their ancestral spirits;
their bones are cleaned, the flesh scraped off, the body fluids t^own
away, and the eyes tom from their sockets.^* Accorc^g to a Yakut
informant, the spirits carry the future shaman to Hell and shut him
in a house for three years. Here he undergoes his initiation; the
spirits cut off his head (which they set to one side, for the novice
must watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes) and hack
his body to bits, which are later distributed among the spirits of
various sicknesses. It is only on this condition that the future
shaman will obtain the power of healing. His bones are then covered
with new flesh, and in some cases he is also given new blood.^''
According to another Yakut informant, black “devils” cut up the
future shaman’s body and throw the pieces in different directions
as offerings, then thrast a lance into his head and cut off his jaw-
bone.^^ A Samoyed shaman told Lehtisalo that the spirits attacked
him and hacked him to pieces, also cutting off his hands. For
seven days and nights he lay unconscious on the ground, while his
soul was in Heaven.®® From a long and eventful autobiography
that an Avam-Samoyed shaman confided to A. A. Popov, I will
select a few significant episodes. Striken with smallpox, the future
shaman remained unconscious for three days, so nearly dead that
on the third day he was almost buried. He saw himself go down to
Hell, and, after many adventures, was carried to an island, in the
middle of which stood a young birch tree which reached up to
Heaven. It was the Tree of the Lord of the Earth, and the Lord gave
him a branch of it to make himself a drum. Next he came to a
mountain. Passing through an opening, he met a naked man ply-
ing the bellows at an immense fire on which was a kettle. The man
caught him with a hook, cut off his head, and chopped his body to
bits and put them all into the kettle. There he boUed the body for
three years, and then forged him a head on an anvil. Finally he
fished out the bones, which were floating in a river, put them to-
gether, and covered them with flesh. During his adventures in the
Other World, the future shaman met several semidivine personages,
in human or animal form, and each of them revealed doctrines to

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91

him or taught him secrets of the healing art. When he awoke in
his yurt, among his relatives, he was initiated and could begin to
shamanize.^®

A Tungus shaman relates that, during his initiatory sickness, his
shaman ancestors pierced him with arrows until he lost conscious-
ness and fell to the ground; then they cut off his flesh, drew out his
bones, and counted them before him; if one had been missing, he
could not have become a shaman.'*^ According to the Buriat the
candidate is tortured by his shaman ancestors, who strike him, cut
up his body with a knife, and cook his flesh.^^ a Teleut woman be-
came a shamaness after having a vision in which unknown men
cut her body to pieces and boiled it in a pot.^^ According to the
traditions of the Altaic shamans, their ancestral spirits open their
bellies, eat their flesh, and drink their blood.^^

These few examples are enough to show that initiatory sicknesses
closely follow the fundamental pattern of all initiations: first, torture
at the hands of demons or spirits, who play the role of masters of
initiation; second, ritual death, experienced by the patient as a
descent to HeU or an ascent to Heaven; third, resurrection to a new
mode of being — the mode of “consecrated man,” that is, a man
who can personally communicate with gods, demons, and spirits.
The different kinds of suffering undergone by the future shaman
are valuated as so many religious experiences; his psychopatholog-
ical crises are explained as illustrating the carrying off of his soul
by demons, or its ecstatic journeys to Hell or Heaven; his physical
pains are regarded as arising from the dismemberment of his body.
But whatever the nature of his sufferings may be, they have a role
in the making of the shaman only to the extent to which he gives
them a religious significance and, by the fact, accepts them as
ordeals indispensable to his mystical transfiguration. For, as we
must not forget, initiatory death is always followed by a resurrec-
tion; that is, in terms of psychopathological experience, the crisis
is resolved and the sickness cured. The shaman’s integration of a
new personality is in large part dependent on his being cured.

Thus far, I have cited only Siberian examples; but the dismem-
berment pattern is found almost everywhere. During the initiation
of the Araucanian shaman, the master makes the spectators be-
lieve that he exchanges the novice’s eyes and tongue for others and
puts a stick through his abdomen.^^ Among the River Patwin, the
candidate for the Kuksu society is supposed to have his navel
pierced by a lance and an arrow from Kuksu’s own hands; he dies

92 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

and is resuscitated by a shaman.^^ Among the Sudanese of the
Nuba Mountains, the first initiatory consecration is called “head,”
because “the novice’s head is opened so that the spirit can enter.”^*^
At Malekula, the initiation of the medicine man includes, among
other things, the novice’s dismemberment: the master cuts off his
arms, feet, and head, and then puts them back in place.^^ Among
the Dyaks, the manangs say that they cut off the candidate’s
head, remove the brain, and wash it, thus giving him a clearer
mind.^® Finally, as we shall soon see, cutting up the body and
exchange of viscera are essential rites in some initiations of Aus-
tralian medicine men. Initiatory cutting up of shamans and med-
icine men would deserve a long comparative investigation; for
their resemblance to the myth and ritual of Osiris, on the one hand,
and the ritual dismemberment of the Hindu meriah, on the other,
are disconcerting and have not yet been explained.®®

One of the specific characteristics of shamanic initiations, aside
from the candidate’s dismemberment, is his reduction to the state
of a skeleton. We find this motif not only in the accounts of the
crises and sicknesses of those who have been chosen by the spirits
to become shamans but also in the experiences of those who have
acquired their shamanic powers through their own efforts, after a
long and arduous quest. Thus, for example, among the Ammasilik
Eskimos, the apprentice spends long hours in his snow hut, meditat-
ing. At a certain moment, he falls “dead,” and remains lifeless for
three days and nights; during this period an enormous polar bear
devours all his flesh and reduces him to a skeleton.®^ It is only after
this mystical experience that the apprentice receives the gift of
shamanizing. The angakuts of the Iglulik Eskimos are able in
thought to strip their bodies of flesh and blood and to contemplate
their own skeletons for long periods.®^ I may add that visualizing
one’s own death at the hands of demons and final reduction to the
state of a skeleton are favorite meditations in Indo-Tibetan and
Mongolian Buddhism.®® Finally, we may note that the skeleton is
quite often represented on the Siberian shaman’s costume.®^

We are here in the presence of a very ancient religious idea,
which belongs to the hunter culture. Bone symbolizes the final root
of animal life, the mold from which the flesh continually arises.
It is from the bone that men and animals are reborn; for a time,
they maintain themselves in an existence of the flesh; then they die,
and their “life” is reduced to the essence concentrated in the
skeleton, from which they will be bom again.®® Reduced to skele-
tons, the future shamans undergo the mystical death that enables

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them to return to the inexhaustible fount of cosmic life. They are
not bom again; they are “revivified”; that is, the skeleton is brought
back to life by being given new flesh.®® This is a religious idea that
is wholly different from the conception of the tillers of the soil;
these see the earth as the ultimate source of life, hence they assim-
ilate the human body to the seed that must be buried in the soil
before it can germinate. For, as we saw, in the initiatory rituals of
many agricultural peoples the neophytes are symbolically buried,
or undergo reversion to the embryonic state in the womb of Mother
Earth. The initiatory scenario of the Asiatic shamans does not
involve a return to the earth (e.g., symbolic burial, being swallowed
by a monster) , but the annihilation of the flesh and hence the reduc-
tion of life to its ultimate and indestructible essence.

Public Rites of Shamanic Initiations

Among the public initiation ceremonies of Siberian shamans,
those of the Buriat are among the most interesting. The principal
rite includes an ascent. A strong birch is set up in the yurt, with its
roots on the hearth and its crown projecting through the smoke
hole. This birch is called udeshi burkhan, “the guardian of the
door,” for it opens the door of Heaven to the shaman. It will always
remain in his tent, serving as distinguishing mark of a shaman’s
residence. On the day of his consecration, the candidate climbs the
birch to the top (in some traditions, he carries a sword in one
hand) and, emerging through the smoke hole, shouts to summon
the aid of the gods. After this, the master shaman (called “father
shaman”), the apprentice, and the entire audience go in procession
to a place far from the village, where, on the eve of the ceremony,
a large number of birches had been set in the ground. The proces-
sion halts by a particular birch, a goat is sacrificed, and the candi-
date, stripped to the waist, has his head, eyes, and ears anointed
with its blood, while other shamans play their drums. The father
shaman now climbs a birch and cuts nine notches in the top of its
trunk. The candidate then climbs it, followed by the other shamans.
As they climb they all fall — or pretend to fall — into ecstasy. Accord-
ing to Potanin, the candidate has to climb nine birches, which, like
the nine notches cut by the father shaman, symbolize the nine
heavens.®*^

As Uno Harva has well seen, the Buriat shaman’s initiation is
strangely reminiscent of certain ceremonies in the Mithraic mys-
teries. For example, the candidate’s purification by the blood of a
goat resembles the taurobolium, the chief rite of the mysteries of

94

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

Mithra, and his climbing the birch suggests the Mithraic mystes*
climbing a ladder with seven rungs, which, according to Celsus,
represented the seven planetary heavens.®® Antique Near Eastern
influences can be observed almost everywhere in central Asia and
Siberia, and very probably the Buriat shaman’s initiatory rite
should be classed among examples of such influences. But it should
be noted that the symbolism of the World Tree and the rite of
initiatory climbing the birch in central and northern Asia are earlier
than the cultural elements brought from Mesopotamia and Iran.
If the conception — which is so characteristic for central Asia and
Siberia — of seven, nine, or sixteen heavens finally derives from the
Babylonian idea of seven planetary heavens, the symbolism of the
World Tree as axis mundi is not specifically Babylonian. This sym-
bolism occurs almost everywhere, and in strata of culture where
Mesopotamian influences cannot reasonably be suspected.®®

What we should note in the initiatory rite of the Buriat shaman
is that the candidate is believed to go to Heaven for his consecra-
tion. To ascend to Heaven by the aid of a tree or a pole is also the
essential rite in the seances of the Altaic shamans.®® The birch
or the pole is assimilated to the tree or pillar which stands at the
center of the world and which connects the three cosmic zones —
earth, Heaven, and Hell. The shaman can also reach the center
of the world by beating his drum. For as the Samoyed shaman’s
dream showed us, the body of the drum is supposed to be made
from a branch taken from the cosmic tree. Listening to the sound
of his drum, the shaman falls into ecstasy, in which he flies to the
tree, that is, to the center of the world.®^ As we saw in the last
chapter, the ritual climbing of a tree or pole plays an important
part in the initiatory rites and religious ceremonies of many South
and North American peoples; we may now add that it is peculiar
especially to shamanic initiations. The initiation of the Araucanian
machi includes the ritual climbing of a tree, or a tree trunk stripped
of its bark, to a platform where the novice addresses a prayer to
the God.®® The Carib pujai undertakes his ecstatic ascent to Heaven
by climbing onto a platform hung from the roof of the hut by a
number of cords twisted together; as they unwind, they whirl the
platform around faster and faster.®®

Techniques of Ecstasy

The examples just cited enable us to distinguish the essential
notes of shamanic initiations and, consequently, to understand

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95

the significance of shamanism for the general history of religion.
The shaman or the medicine man can be defined as a specialist in
the sacred, that is, an individual who participates in the sacred
more completely, or more truly, than other men. Whether he is
chosen by Superhuman Beings or himself seeks to draw their atten-
tion and obtain their favors, the shaman is an individual who
succeeds in having mystical experiences. In the sphere of shaman-
ism in the strict sense, the mystical experience is expressed in the
shaman’s trance, real or feigned. The shaman is pre-eminently an
ecstatic. Now on the plane of primitive religions ecstasy signifies
the soul’s flight to Heaven, or its wanderings about the earth, or>
finally, its descent to the subterranean world, among the dead. The
shaman undertakes these ecstatic journeys for four reasons: first,
to meet the God of Heaven face to face and bring him an offering
from the community; second, to seek the soul of a sick man, which
has supposedly wandered away from his body or been carried off
by demons; third, to guide the soul of a dead man to its new abode;
fourth, to add to his knowledge by frequenting higher beings.®^

But the body’s abandonment by the soul during ecstasy is equiv-
alent to a temporary death. The shaman is, therefore, the man who
can die, and then return to life, many times. This accounts for the
many ordeals and teachings required in every shamanic initiation.
Through his initiation, the shaman learns not only the technique
of dying and returning to life but also what he must do when his
soul abandons his body — and, first of all, how to orient himself in
the unknown regions which he enters during his ecstasy. He learns
to explore the new planes of existence disclosed by his ecstatic
experiences. He knows the road to the center of the world, the hole
in the sky through which he can fly up to the highest Heaven, or
the aperture in the earth through which he can descend to Hell. He
is forewarned of the obstacles that he will meet on his journeys,
and knows how to overcome them. In short, he knows the roads
that lead to Heaven and Hell. All this he learned during his training
in solitude or under the guidance of the master shamans.

Because of his ability to leave his body with impunity, the
shaman can, if he so wishes, act in the manner of a spirit; e.g., he
flies through the air, he becomes invisible, he perceives things at
great distances, he mounts to Heaven or descends to Hell, sees
souls and can capture them, and is incombustible. The exhibition
of certain fakirlike accomplishments during the stances, especially
the so-called fire tricks, is intended to convince the spectators that

96 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INiriATION

the shaman has assimilated the mode of being of spirits. The powers
of taming themselves into animals, of killing at a distance, or of
foretelling the future are also among the powers of spirits; by ex-
hibiting them, the shaman proclaims that he shares in the spirit con-
dition. The desire to behave in the manner of a spirit signifies above
all the desire to assume a superhuman condition; in short, to enjoy
the freedom, the power, and the knowledge of the Supematur^
Beings, whether Gods or spirits. The shaman obtains this trans-
cendent condition by submitting to an initiatory scenario consid-
erably more complex and dramatic than the patterns of initiation
which we examined in the preceding chapters.

In summary, the important moments of a shamanic initiation
are these five: first, torture and violent dismemberment of the body;
second, scraping away of the flesh until the body is reduced to a
skeleton; third, substitution of viscera and renewal of the blood;
fourth, a period spent in Hell, during which the future shaman
is taught by the souls of dead shamans and by “demons”; fifth, an
ascent to Heaven to obtain consecration from the God of Heaven.

Initiations of Australian Medicine Men

Now it is disconcerting to note that this peculiarly Siberian and
central Asian pattern of initiation is found again, almost to the
letter, in Australia. (I refer to the pattern as a whole, and not only
to certain initiatory motifs that are found everywhere, such as
ascent to Heaven, descent to Hell, dismemberment of the body.)
The Siberian-Australian parallelism confronts the historian of re-
ligion with the problem of the possible dissemination of shamanism
from a single center. But before entering upon this difficult ques-
tion, we must see what is the traditional pattern of the initiation
of Australian medicine men. Thanks to A. P. Elkin’s book. Abo-
riginal Men of High Degree , the subject can now be set forth with
reasonable clarity in brief compass.

Just as in the case of northern Asiatic or American shamanism,
in Australia too one becomes a shaman in three ways; by inheriting
the profession, by call or election, by personal quest. But whatever
way he has taken, a candidate is not recognized as a medicine man
unffi he has been accepted by a certain number of medicine men
or been taught by some of them, and, above all, after a more or
less laborious initiation. In the majority of instances, the initiation
consists in an ecstatic experience, during which the candidate
undergoes certain operations performed by mythical Beings, and

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97

undertakes ascents to Heaven or descents to the subterranean
world. The initiatory ritual is also, as Elkin puts it, “a re-enactment
of what has occurred in the past, generally to a cult-hero. If this
is not always clear, at least Supernatural Beings, dream-time or
sky Heroes, or spirits of the dead, are regarded as the operators,
that is the masters of the craft.”®® The candidate is “killed” by one
of these Supernatural Beings, who then perform certain surgical
operations on the lifeless body: the spirit or the dream-time Hero
“removes his ‘insides’ ” and “substitutes new ones together with
some magical substances”;®'^ cuts him open “from his neck to his
groin”; removes his shoulder and thigh bones, and sometimes also
his frontal bone; and “inserts magical substances before drying and
putting them back.”®®

To cite some examples: among the Warburton Ranges tribes the
postulant enters a cave and two totemic Heroes (the wildcat and
the emu) kill him, open his body, remove the organs, and replace
them by magical substances. They also remove the scapula and
tibia and, before restoring them, stuff them with the same magical
substances.®® Among the Arunta, the candidate goes to sleep in
front of the mouth of a cave. A spirit named Iruntarinia kills him
by a lance thrust that enters his neck from behind and comes out
through his mouth. The spirit then carries him into the cave, re-
moves his viscera, and gives him new ones.*^® A famous medicine
man of the Unmatjera tribe told Spencer and Gillen of the essential
moments of his initiation. One day an old doctor “killed” him by
throwing crystals at him with a spear thrower. “The old man then
cut out all of his insides, intestines, liver, heart, lungs — everything
in fact, and left him lying all night long on the ground. In the
morning the old man came and looked at him and placed some
more atnongara stones [i.e., small crystals] inside his body and
in his arms and legs, and covered over his face with leaves. Then
he sang over him until his body was all swollen up. When this was
so he provided him with a complete set of new inside parts, placed
a lot more atnongara stones in him, and patted him on the head,
which caused him to jump up alive.”^^

R. and C. Berndt have collected valuable information regarding
the making of the medicine man among the tribes of the Western
Desert of South Australia. Mourned as dead, because everyone
knows that he will be “cut into pieces,” the postulant goes to a
water hole. There two medicine men cover his eyes and throw him
into the jaws of the Serpent, which swallows him. The postulant

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98

lemains in the Serpent’s belly for an indefinite time. Finally the
medicine men bring two kangaroo rats as an offering to the Serpent,
whereupon the Serpent ejects the postulant, throwing him high
into the air. He f^ls “alongside a certain rock-hole,” and the
medicine men set out in search of him, but he has been reduced to
the size of an infant. (The initiatory theme of regression to the
embryonic in the monster’s beUy, homologous with the maternal
womb, is apparent here.) One of the medicine men takes the baby
in his arms and “they fly back to the camp.”

After this consecration, which is mystical because performed by
a Supernatural Being, the initiation proper begins, in which the
old masters play the principal role. Set in a circle of fire, the baby-
postulant rapidly grows and recovers his adult size. He declares
that he knows the Serpent well, that they are even friends, for he
stayed in its beUy for some time. Then comes a period of seclusion,
during which the postulant meditates and converses with the spirits.
One day the medicine men take him to the bush and smear his
body with red ocher. “He is made to lie full-length on his back
before fires, and is said to be a dead man. The head-doctor
proceeds to break his neck and his wrists, and to dislocate the joints
at the elbows, the upper thighs, the knees and ankles.” The masters
stuff his body with shells, and also put shells into his ears and jaws,
so that the postulant will be able to hear and understand spirits,
birds, and strangers. His stomach too is stuffed with shells, so
that he will have a “renewed life and become invulnerable to
attack by any weapon.” Then he is “sung” by the medicine men,
and revives. All return to the camp, where the new doctor is
tested: the medicine men throw their lances at him; but because
of the shells with which he is stuffed, he is not harmed.''^

This example represents a highly elaborate initiation. We can
recognize two principal initiatory themes in it: (1 ) being swallowed
by a monster, and (2) bodily dismemberment — of which only the
second is peculiar to the initiations of medicine men. What we
really have here is two initiations, the first performed by a Super-
natural Being, the second by the doctors. But although he under-
goes a return to the womb, the postulant does not die in the
Serpent’s belly, for he is able to remember his sojourn there. The
real initiatory putting to death is performed by the old doctors,
and in the manner reserved for medicine men: dismemberment of
the bo(fy, change of organs, introduction of magical substances.

For ^ initiatory operations proper always include the renewal

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99

of the organs and viscera, the cleaning of the bones, and the inser-
tion of magical substances — quartz crystals or pearl shell, or
“spirit snakes.” Quartz is connected with the “sky world and with
the rainbow”; pearl shell is similarly “connected with the
rainbow serpent,” that is, in sum, still with the sky.^® This sky
symbolism goes along with ecstatic ascents to Heaven; for in many
regions the candidate is believed to visit the sky, whether by his
own power (for example, by climbing a rope) or carried by a
snake. In the sky he converses with the Supernatural Beings and
mythical Heroes. Other initiations involve a descent to the realm of
the dead: for example, the future medicine man goes to sleep by the
burying ground, or enters a cave, or is transported underground
or to the bottom of a lake.'^^ Among some tribes, the initiation
also includes the novice’s being “roasted” in or at a fire.*^® Finally,
the candidate is resuscitated by the same Supernatural Beings who
had killed him, and he is now “a man of Power.”^® During and after
his initiation he meets with spirits. Heroes of the mythical Times,
and souls of the dead — and in a certain sense they all instruct him
in the secrets of the medicine man’s profession. Naturally, the
training proper is concluded under the direction of the older masters.

In short, the candidate becomes a medicine man through a
ritual of initiatory death, followed by a resurrection to a new and
superhuman condition. But the initiatory death of the Australian
medicine man, like that of the Siberian shaman, has two specific
notes not found elsewhere in combination: first, a series of opera-
tions performed on the candidate’s body (opening of the abdomen,
renewal of the organs, washing and drying the bones, insertion of
magical substances); second, an ascent to Heaven, sometimes
followed by other ecstatic journeys into the Other World. The reve-
lations concerning the secret techniques of the medicine men arc
obtained in trance, in dream, or in the waking state, before, during,
or after the initiatory ritual proper.

Asiatic Influences in Australia

Elkin compares the initiatory pattern of the Australian medicine
man to a mummification ritu^ documented in eastern Australia,
and which seems to have been introduced by way of the Torres
Strait islands, where a certain type of mummification was practiced
until quite recently.'^^ Melanesian influences on Australian culture
are incontestable. But Elkin is inclined to believe that these Melan-
esian influences brought ideas and techniques that originally be-

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100

longed to other, higher cultures. If he does not insist upon the
final Egyptian origin of the ritual of mummification, he compares,
and rightly, the parapsychological powers of the Australian medi-
cine men with the feats of Indian and Tibetan yogis. For walking
on fire, using the magic cord, the power of disappearing and reap-
pearing, “fast traveling,” and so on, are just as popular among
Australian medicine men as they are among yogis and fakirs. “It
is possible,” Elkin writes, “that there is some historical connection
between the Yoga and occult practices of India and Tibet and the
practices and psychic powers of Aboriginal men of high degree.
Hinduism spread to the East Indies. Yoga is a cult in Bali, and some
of the remarkable feats of the Australian medicine men are par-
alleled by their fellow-professionals in Papua.”^®

If Elkin’s conjecture should prove to be well founded, we should
have, in Australia, a situation comparable to that which we have
already noted in central Asia and Siberia; just as central and north
Asian shamanism seems to have been profoundly affected by
elements of culture coming from Mesopotamia, Iran, India, and
China, so the corpus of rites, beliefs, and occult techniques of the
Australian medicine men may have taken its present form primar-
ily under Indian influence. But this is by no means to say that
these two forms of shamanism — Australian and north Asian —
should be regarded as the result of influences received from higher
religions. Such influences have certainly modified the mystical
ideologies and techniques of shamanism, but they did not create
them.

The problem of the origin and dissemination of shamanism is
certainly extremely complicated, and I cannot enter upon it here.*^®
But I must at least mention a few of the most important points.
First, it should be said that the specifically shamanic techniques and
ideologies — ^for example, ascending to Heaven by means of a tree,
or “magic flight” — are documented almost all over the world,
and it seems difficult to explain them by Mesopotamian or Indian
influences. Equally widespread are the beliefs concerning an axis
mundi at the center of the universe, a point that makes possible
communication between the three cosmic zones. Next, we must
bear in mind that the fundamental characteristic of shamanism is
ecstasy, interpreted as the soul forsaking the body. Now no one
has yet shown that the ecstatic experience is the creation of a partic-
ular historical civilization or a particular cultural cycle. In all
probability the ecstatic experience, in its many aspects, is coex-

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101

istent with the human condition, in the sense that it is an integral
part of what is called man’s gaining consciousness of his specific
mode of being in the world. Shamanism is not only a technique
of ecstasy; its theology and its philosophy finally depend on the
spiritual value that is accorded to ecstasy.

What is the meaning of all these shamanic myths of ascent to
Heaven and magical flight, or of the power to become invisible
and incombustible? They all express a break with the universe of
daily life. The twofold purpose of this break is obvious: it is
the transcendence and the freedom that are obtained, for
example, through ascent, flight, invisibility, incombustibility of the
body. I need hardly add that the terms transcendence and freedom
are not documented on the archaic levels of culture. But the
experience is there, and that is what is important. The desire for
absolute freedom — that is, the desire to break the bonds that keep
him tied to earth, and to free himself from his limitations — ^is
one of man’s essential nostalgias. And the break from plane to
plane effected by flight or ascent similarly signifies an act of
transcendence; flight proves that one has transcended the human
condition, has risen above it, by transmuting it through an excess
of spirituality. Indeed, all the myths, the rites, and the legends that
we have just reviewed can be translated as the longing to see the
human body act after the manner of a spirit, to transmute man’s
corporal modality into the spirit’s moddity.®*^

The history of religion shows that such a desire to behave
like a spirit is a universal phenomenon; it is not confined to any
particular moment in the history of humanity. In the archaic
religions, the shaman and the medicine man play the role of the
mystics in developed religions; hence they constitute an exemplary
model for the rest of the community precisely because they have re-
alized transcendence and freedom, and have, by that fact, become
like spirits and other Supernatural Beings. And tfiere is good reason
to believe that the desire to resemble Supernatural Beings has
tormented man from the beginning of his history.

The problem of shamanism goes beyond the sphere of our in-
vestigation, and I have had to limit myself to presenting only
some aspects of this extremely complex religious phenomenon,
namely, its initiatory ideology and rituals. Here again we have seen
the importance of the theme of mystical death and rebirth. But
we have also observed the presence of certain notes that are almost
peculiar to shamanic initiation: dismemberment of the body,

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RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

reduction to a skeleton, renewal of the internal organs; the great
importance accorded to mystic ascents and to descents into the
world underground; finally, the outstanding role of memory.
Shamans and medicine men are men who remember their ecstatic
experiences. Some shamans even claim that they can remember
their previous existences.®' We observe, then, a marked deepening
of the experience of initiatory death and at the same time a
strengthening of memory and, in general, of all the psychomental
faculties. The shaman stands out by the fact that he has succeeded
in integrating into consciousness a considerable number of experi-
ences that, for the profane world, are reserved for dreams, madness,
or post-mortem states. The shamans and mystics of primitive
societies are considered — and rightly — ^to be superior beings; their
magicoreligious powers also find expression in an extension of their
mental capacities. Hence the shaman becomes the exemplar and
model for all those who seek to acquire power. The shaman is
the man who knows and remembers, that is, who understands the
mysteries of life and death; in short, who shares in the spirit con-
dition. He is not solely an ecstatic but also a contemplative, a
thinker. In later civilizations the philosopher will be recruited
among these beings, to whom the mysteries of existence represent a
passionate interest and who are drawn, by vocation, to know the
inner life.

CHAPTER VI

Patterns of Initiation in Higher Religions

What 1 have set myself to accomplish in this last chapter may seem
rash, not to say foolhardy. Not because certain traditional patterns
of initiation are not still clearly discernible in the higher religions,
but because to study them would require more elaborate treatment
than is possible in a single chapter. The religions to which we now
come are infinitely more complex than primitive religions. As it
happens — except for those of India — ^they are no longer living
religions; and we cannot always be sure that we rightly understand
the few documents that they have left to us. The reader hardly
needs to be reminded that initiation is first and foremost a secret
rite. If we know something about initiations in primitive societies,
it is because a few white men have contrived to be initiated and
because a few natives have given us some information. Even so,
we are far from apprehending the deeper dimensions of primitive
initiations.

What can we reliably report concerning the rites of Eleusis or
the Greco-Oriental mysteries? In regard to their secret ceremonies,
we have practically no direct testimony at all. In general, our infor-
mation on the subject of initiation in antiquity is fragmentary and
secondhand; it is even frankly partisan when it has come to us
from Christian writers. If, nevertheless, scholars have been able
to discuss antique initiations, it is precisely because they have
believed that they could reconstruct certain initiatory patterns — ^in
the last analysis, because they were already acquainted with the
phenomenon of initiation, either as it is still to be observed in the

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104 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

primitive and Asiatic worlds or as it was understood at certain
periods in the history of Christianity. From the methodological
point of view, the reconstruction of an initiatory scenario on the
basis of a few fragmentary documents and with the aid of ingenious
comparisons is a perfectly valid procedure. But if we can hope to
reconstruct the initiatory pattern of the Greco-Oriental mysteries,
it would be dangerous to conclude that, by so doing, we should
also have deciphered the religious experiences of the initiates.
The question whether the content of such religious experiences is
still accessible to modern scholars, limited, as we have seen, to a
lamentably scanty documentation, can be argued endlessly. What-
ever side he may take in this methodological controversy, every
scholar agrees that we cannot hope for valid results except at the
price of a long and most meticulous labor of exegesis. Such a
labor is not possible here. So, for the most part, we shall have to
content ourselves with approximations.

India

I shall begin with India, for there a large number of archaic
religious forms have been preserved alongside more recent ideas
and beliefs. We had occasion earlier to examine the upanayana,
the puberty rite that is obligatory for the three highest castes and
through which the novice is born into brahman, thus becoming
dvi-ja, “twice-born.” We also examined the diksha, the initiatory
rite which must be performed by anyone who is about to offer the
soma sacrifice, and which essentially consists in the sacrificer’s
symbolic transformation into an embryo. Finally, we reviewed
another initiatory rite of return to the womb — ^the hiranyagarbha,
involving the mystical birth of the postulant from Mother Earth.
Both the diksha and the hiranyagarbha are initiations that give the
postulant access to the deepest zones of sacrality. But India has
several other initiations of the same type, that is, which pursue a
more complete participation in the sacred, or a radical change in
the initiand’s existential status. It is this class of initiations which
especially concerns us now — ^initiations that accomplish passage
from the profane to a transcendent state. From the morphological
point of view, we could consider these initiations to be the Indian
counterpart of initiations into secret societies in the primitive
world, and, in particular, of shamanic initiations. Of course, this
does not mean that the two contents can be homologized; but only
that we are dealing with highly specialized initiations, to which

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS 105

only a comparatively small number of individuals submit them-
selves, in the hope of transmuting their mode of being.

Sometimes the pattern of an archaic initiation is preserved almost
entire, although the experience of initiatory death is given new
values. The most illuminating examples of continuing and at the
same time revaluating an archaic pattern are found in Indo-
Tibetan Tantrism. Tantrism is pre-eminently the expression of the
indigenous spirituality, the reaction of the not fully Hinduized
popular strata. Hence it naturally makes use of archaic, pre-Aryan
religious categories. Thus, for example, we find the characteristic
motifs of shamanic initiations in the myths, rites, and folklore of
the Tantric siddhas, especially Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath,
figures who particularly struck the popular imagination. According
to some legends, Gorakhnath initiated Matsyendranath’s two sons
in the following way: he killed them, washed their entrails “after
the fashion of washerwomen,” hung their skins from the branches
of a tree, and then resuscitated them.^ This scenario is curiously re-
miniscent of one of the motifs peculiar to the initiations of Siberian
shamans and Australian medicine men. And Queen Mayanamati,
who was also initiated by Gorakhnath, behaved like a shaman:
she was incombustible, floated on water, could cross a bridge
made of a hair, walked on the edge of a razor, descended to Hell,
fought with the God of Death and recovered her husband’s soul.^

All these are folklore motifs whose closest counterpart is found
in the oral literature of the central Asian and Siberian shamans.®
But these motifs also have analogues in the rites of Tantrism. To
give only one example: in the Indo-Tibetan rite called tchoed
(gtchod), the novice offers his own flesh for the demons to eat.
By the power of his meditation, he conjures up a Goddess holding
a sword, who decapitates him and cuts his body to pieces; then he
sees demons and wild beasts fling themselves on the fragments of
his flesh and devour them. In another Tantric meditation, the
novice imagines that he is being stripped of his flesh and finally
sees himself as a “huge, white, shining skeleton.”^ We* have come
upon this same initiatory theme in Siberian and Eskimo shamanism.
But in the case of the Indo-Tibetan tchoed, we have a new valuation
of the traditional theme of dismemberment and reduction to a
skeleton — the novice submits himself to an initiatory ordeal by
stimulating his imagination to conjure up a terrifying vision, which,
however, he masters by the power of his thought. He knows that
what is before him is a creation of his own mind; that the Goddess

106 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

and the demons are as unreal as is his own body and, with it, the
entire cosmos. For the novice is a Mahayana Buddhist; he knows
that the world is “void,” in other words, ontologically unreal.

This initiatory meditation is at the same time a post-mortem
experience, hence a descent to Hell — ^but through it the novice
realizes the emptiness of all posthumous experience, so that he will
feel no more fear at the moment of death and will thus escape
being reborn on earth. The traditional experience of bodily dis-
memberment — ^brought on, in the shamanic world, by suitable
rites, by initiatory sicknesses, or by dreams and visions — is no
longer interpreted as a mystical death, indispensable for resurrec-
tion into a new mode of being; it now serves as an instrument of
knowledge; by virtue of it, the novice understands what is meant
by the universal void, and thereby draws closer to final deliverance.®

But to gain the best possible view of the process of revaluating
a traditional initiatory theme, our best course will be to consider
the various techniques that together go to make up Yoga. Not only
does the outward aspect of Yoga practice suggest the behavior of a
novice during his initiatory training; for the yogi forsakes the
company of men, withdraws into solitude, submits to a course of
ascetic practices that are sometimes extremely severe, and puts
him self under the oral teaching of a master, a teaching that is
pre-eminently secret, communicated “from mouth to ear,” as the
Hindu texts put it. In addition to all this, the corpus of Yoga
practices reproduces an initiatory pattern. Like every other initia-
tion, Yoga ends by radically changing the existential status of him
who submits himself to its rules. By virtue of Yoga, the ascetic
abolishes the human condition (in Indian terms, the unenlightened
life, the existence doomed to suffering) and gains an unconditioned
mode of being — ^what the Indians call deliverance, freedom,
moksha, mukti, nirvana. But to annihilate the profane human
condition in order to gain absolute freedom means to die to this
conditioned mode of being and to be reborn into another, a mode
of being that is transcendent, unconditioned.

The symbolism of initiatory death is clearly discernible in the
various psychophysiological techniques peculiar to Yoga. If we
watch a yogi while he is practicing Yoga, we get the impression that
he is tryfiag in every way to do exactly the opposite of what is done
“in the world,” that is, what men do as men, prisoners of their own
ignorance. We see that, instead of constantly moving, the yogi
immobilizes himself in an absolutely static posture, a posture which

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS 107

is called asana and which makes him like a stone or a plant. To the
agitated and unrhythmical breathing of the man who lives in the
world, he opposes pranayama, rhythmical reduction of the tempo
of respiration, and dreams of finally achieving complete suspension
of breath. To the chaotic flux of psychomental life, he replies by
fixing his thought on a single point {ekagratd). In short, he does
the opposite of what life obliges man to do — and he does this
in order to free himself from the multifarious conditionings that
constitute the whole of profane existence, and to make his way
at last to an unconditioned plane, a plane of absolute freedom.
But he cannot reach such a situation, comparable to that of the
Gods, except by dying to unenlightened life, to profane existence.

In the case of Yoga, we are dealing with a complex of beliefs,
ideas, and ascetic and contemplative techniques whose object is to
transmute, and hence to abolish, the human condition. Now we
must take good note that this long and difficult ascetic training
proceeds along the well-known lines of a pattern of initiation; in the
last analysis. Yoga practice “kills” the normal (that is, the metaphys-
ically “ignorant”) man, prey to illusions, and engenders a new man,
deconditioned and free. Obviously, the final goal of Yoga cannot
be homologized with the ends pursued by the various shamanic
initiations or initiations into secret societies which we analyzed in
the last two chapters. For if there are yogis whose aim is mystical
union with the Deity, the true yogi strives above all to obtain
perfect spiritual autonomy. But what is of interest to our investiga-
tion is the fact that all these various goals, pursued by mystics or
magicians, shamans or yogis, require ascetic training and spiritual
exercises which, in their very structure, display the classic pattern of
initiation — the neophyte’s transmutation through a mystical death.

This becomes even more evident if we examine certain yogic
meditations. We have just seen in what sense the symbolism of
mystical death was revaluated by the Tantric tchoed. Knowl-
edge of post-mortem states can also be obtained through an exer-
cise described in the Shiva-samhita: by a particular meditation,
the yogi anticipates the process of reabsorption which occurs after
death. And since the yogic sadhana also has a cosmic context, the
same meditation also reveals the process by which the cosmos is
periodically reabsorbed.®

Another traditional initiatory theme taken over and revaluated
Buddhism is that of the “new body” in which the
initiate is reborn. The Buddha himself says that he has shown his

108 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

disciples the methods that, starting from the body of flesh, produce
another body, formed from an “intellectual substance” (rupim
manomayam) And Hathayogis, Tantrics, and alchemists seek,
through their respective techniques, to obtain a “divine body”
idivya deha), which is absolutely spiritual (cinmaya), or to change
Ae natural body, which is raw, “unripe” (apakva) , into a body Aat
is perfect, “ripe” (pakva)? In short, we find in India, Aough
charged wiA oAer values, Ae same primordial images that we have
found in traAtional mitiations — dismemberment of the body,
deaA and resurrection, generation and new birth, obtaining a
new, supernatural body. However different the ends pursued by
Ae Indian sage, magician, or mystic, Aey all hope to realize them
through corporal and psychomental techniques whose object is
abolishing the human condition. FurAermore Ae process of man’s
deliverance or divinization can always be homologized with Ae
essential moments of an initiation, and it is never more clearly ex-
pressed Aan in Ae traditional imagery and terminology of initiations.

Traces of Puberty Rites in Ancient Greece

If we now Arn to the Mediterranean religions, we again find Ae
three great categories of initiations — puberty rites, secret confra-
ternities, and mystical initiations. But we dct not ^d all Aree of
Aem in the same historical period. When Greece and Rome make
Aeir entrance into history, their puberty rites appear to have lost
Ae religious aura which, to judge from myA and legend, they
possessed during Ae protohistorical period. To confine ourselves to
Greece: in Ae historic period puberty rites appear in Ae diluted
form of a civic education that included, among other things, a
nondramatic introduction of boys into Ae religious life of Ae
city. Yet Ae myAological personages and scenarios that regulate
this series of civic ceremonies still preserve Ae memory of a more
archaic state of things, which is not wiAout resemblances to the
atmosphere in which puberty rites are performed among primitive
peoples. Thus, for example, it has been shown Aat Ae legendary
figure of Theseus, and Ae rites connected wiA his name, can be
more easily explained if we regard Aem as dependent upon an
initiatory scenario. Many episodes in Ae saga of Theseus are in
fact initiatory ordeals — ^for example, his ritual descent into Ae
sea* (an ordeal equivalent to a journey to Ae beyond) and precisely
to Ae undersea palace of Ae Nereids (Aemselves the very type of
Ae fairies who protect young men) ; or, again, his entering Ae lab-

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

109

yrinth and fighting the monster, a typical theme of heroic initia-
tions; or finally, his carrying off Ariadne, one of the many
epiphanies of Aphrodite, which means that Theseus completes his
initiation by a hierogamy. According to H. Jeanmaire, the cere-
monies constituting the Theseia stemmed from archaic rituals
which, at an earlier period, marked the return of the boys to the
city, after their initiatory period in the bush.^®

It has also been shown that an ancient puberty scenario survived
in the famous Spartan discipline of Lycurgus, which, among other
things, included the toughening of the body and the art of hiding
(krypteid). This custom in every way resembled the archaic initi-
atory ordeals. The adolescent was sent away to the mountains,
naked, and had to live for a whole year on what he could steal,
being careful to let no one see him; any novice who let himself be
seen was punished.^^ In other words, the Lacedemonian youth
led the life of a wolf for a whole year. In addition there are sim-
ilarities between the krypteia and lycanthropy. To change into a
wolf, or to behave like a wolf ritually, are typical characteristics
of the martial and shamanic initiations. We are here in the presence
of archaic beliefs and rites which long survived both in northern
and southern Europe.

It would be easy to extend our list of the survivals of initiatory
figures and scenarios in Greek myths and legends. The mythical
Curetes^^ still show traces of their function as masters of
initiation: they bring up boys in the bush, teaching them the
archaic techniques of hunting and gathering wild fruits, of dancing
and music. So too certain moments in the story of Achilles can be
interpreted as initiatory ordeals: he was brought up by the centaurs,
that is, he was initiated in the bush by masters in animal disguise
or manifesting themselves under animal aspects; he passed through
fire and water, classic initiatory ordeals, and he even lived for a
time among girls, dressed as a girl, a custom characteristic of
certain primitive puberty initiations.

Eleusis and the Hellenistic Mysteries

It would be possible to show that ancient themes from puberty
initiations survived in the same way in Iran or Rome.^® But the
time has come for us to approach initiations that were still alive
in historical times, so that we see in what way, and to what an extent,
an ancient scenario can be revaluated in a highly developed
society. The Eleusinian mysteries, the rites of Dionysus, Orphism,

no

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

are exceedingly complex phenomena, whose importance in the
religious and cultural history of Greece is considerable.^^ We shall
here be concerned only with their initiatory rites. Now, as I said
earlier, it is on this particular subject that we are least well docu-
mented. Nevertheless, we are able to reconstruct their patterns.
The Eleusinian mysteries,^® like the Dionysiac ceremonies, were
founded on a divine myth; hence the succession of rites reactualized
the primordial event narrated in the myth, and the participants in
the rites were progressively introduced into the divine presence. To
give an example: on the evening of their arrival at Eleusis, the
initiands broke off their dances and rejoicings when they were
told that Kore had been carried away. Torch in hand, crying and
lamenting, they wandered everywhere, searching for Kore. Sud-
denly a herald announced that Helios had revealed where Kore
was; and again all was gaiety, music, dancing. The myth of Demeter
and Kore became contemporary once more; the rape of Kore,
Demeter’s laments, take place here and now, and it is by virtue
of this nearness of the Goddesses, and finally of their presence,
that the initiate (mystes) will have the unforgettable experience of
initiation.

For, as Aristotle already noted (Frag. 15), the mystes did not
learn anything new; he already knew the myth, and he was not
taught any really secret doctrine; but he performed ritual gestures
and saw sacred objects. The initiation proper was performed in the
place of initiation (telesterion) at Eleusis. It began with purifica-
tions. Then, his head covered by a cloth, the mystes was led into
the telesterion and seated on a chair spread with an animal skin.
For everything after this, we are reduced to conjecture. Clement
of Alexandria (JProtrepticus, II, 21) has preserved the sacred
formula of the mysteries: ‘T fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took
out of the chest, having done the act I put again into the basket,
and from the basket again into the chest.” We understand the
first two parts of the rite — the fast and the drinking of the
kykeon, which was a mixture of flour, water and mint that, ac-
cording to the myth. Queen Metanira had offered to Demeter, ex-
hausted by her long search for Kore.

For the rest of the sacred formula handed down by Clement,
numerous interpretations have been proposed, which there is not
space to discuss here,^® Some form of initiatory death, that is, a
symbolic descent to Hell, is not improbable, for the play on words
lietween “initiation” (teleisthai) and “dying” (teleutan) was quite

PATTERNS OP INITUTION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

in

popular in Greece.^*^ “To die is to be initiated/’ Plato said. K, as
seems likely, the mystical chest represented the nether world, the
mystes, by opening it, symbolically descended to Hell. What we
must note is that after this mysterious handling of the sacred
objects, the mystes was bom anew. We leam from Hippolytus that,
at the culminating moment, the hierophant announced: “She who is
Magnificent has given birth to a sacred child, Brimo (has en-
gendered) Brimos.”^® Finally, the second degree of initiation
included the epopteia; the mystes became the epoptes, “he who
sees.” We know that the torches were put out, a curtain raised,
and the hierophant appeared with a box. He opened it and took
out a ripe ear of grain. According to Walter Otto, “there can be no
doubt of the miraculous nature of the event. The ear of wheat
growing and maturing with a supernatural suddenness is just as
much a part of the mysteries of Demeter as the vine growing in a
few hours is part of the revels of Dionysus. . . . We find exactly
the same plant miracles in the nature festivals of primitive
peoples.”^® Soon afterward the sacred marriage between the hiero-
phant and the priestess of Demeter took place.

It would be naive to suppose that this brief treatment could
convey the essentials of a mystery which, for over a thousand
years, dominated the religious life of Greece and which, for at
least a century, has given rise to impassioned controversies among
scholars. The Eleusinian mysteries — ^like Dionysianism and
Orphism in general — confront the investigator with countless prob-
lems, especially in regard to their origin and, hence, their antiquity.
For in each of these cases we have to do with extremely archaic
rites and beliefs. None of these initiatory cults can be regarded
as a creation of the Greek mind. Their roots go deep into pre-
history. Cretan, Asiatic, and Thracian traditions were taken over,
enriched, and incorporated into a new religious horizon. It was
through Athens that Eleusis became a Panhellenic religious center;
but the mysteries of Demeter and Kore had been celebrated at
Eleusis for centuries. The Eleusinian initiation descends directly
from an agricultural ritual centered around the death and
resurrection of a divinity controlling the fertility of the fields. The
bull-roarer, which figured in the Orphic-Dionysiac ceremonies, is a
religious object characteristic of primitive hunter cultures.^® The
myths and rites illustrating the dismemberment of Dionysus and
of Orpheus — or Osiris — are strangely reminiscent of the Australian
and Siberian data described in the preceding chapter. The myths

112

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

and rites of Eleusis have their counterpart in the religions of certain
tropical cultures whose structure is agricultural and matriarchal.^^
The fact that such elements of archaic religious practice recur in
the most central position in the Greek and the Greco-Oriental
mysteries proves not only their extraordinary vitality but also their
importance for the religious life of humanity. Undoubtedly we
here have religious experiences that are at once primordial and
exemplary.

For the purpose of our investigation, one thing is particularly of
interest — ^that these experiences are brought on by rites which,
both in the Greco-Oriental and the primitive worlds, are initiatory,
that is, pursue the novice’s spiritual transmutation. At Eleusis, as
in the Orphic-Dionysiac ceremonies, as in the Greco-Oriental
mysteries of the Hellenistic period, the mystes submits himself to
initiation in order to transcend the human condition and to obtain
a higher, superhuman mode of being. The initiatory rites reactu-
alize an origin myth, which relates the adventures, death, and
resurrection of a Divinity. We know very little about these secret
rites, yet we know that the most important of them concerned the
death and mystical resurrection of the initiand.

On the occasion of his initiation into the mysteries of Isis,
Apuleius suffered a “voluntary death” {ad instar voluntariae
mortis) and “approached the realm of death” to obtain his “spir-
itual birthday” {natalem sacrum)?^ The exemplary model for
these rites was the myth of Osiris. It is probable that in the mystery
of the Phrygian Great Mother — and perhaps elsewhere too — the
mystes was symbolically buried in a tomb.^® According to Firmicus
Maternus, he was regarded as moriturus, “about to die.”^^ This
mystical death was followed by a new, spiritual birth. In the
Phrygian rite, Sallustius records, the new initiates “received nourish-
ment of milk as if they were being reborn.”^® And in the text which
is known under the title of the Liturgy of Mithra, but which is
pervaded with Hermetic Gnosticism, we read: “Today, having
been born again by thee, out of so many myriads rendered im-
mortal . . .” or “Born again for rebirth of that life-giving birth
*»26

Everywhere there is this spiritual regeneration, a palingenesis,
which found its expression in the radical change in the mystes’
existential status. By virtue of his initiation, the neophyte attained
to another mode of being; he became equal to the Gods, was one
with the Gods. Apotheosis, deification, demortalizing (apathana-

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

113

tismos) are concepts familiar to all the Hellenistic mysteries.^’^
Indeed, for antiquity in general, the divinization of man was not
an extravagant dream. “Know, then, that you are a God,” Cicero
wrote.2® ^jid in a Hermetic text we read: “I know thee, Hermes,
and thou knowest me: lam thou and thou art Similar expres-
sions are found in Christian writings. As Clement of Alexandria
says, the true (Christian) Gnostic “has already become God.”®®
And for Lactantius, the chaste man will end by becoming con-
similis Deo, “identical in all respects with God.”®^

The ontological transmutation of the initiate was proved above
all through his existence after death. The Homeric Hymn to
Demeter, Pindar, and Sophocles already praise the bliss of initiates
in the Other World, and pity those who die without having been
initiated.®^ In the Hellenistic period the idea that he who had been
initiated into the mysteries enjoyed a privileged spiritual situation,
both during life and after death, had become increasingly wide-
spread. Those who submitted to initiation, then, sought thereby to
obtain a superhuman ontological status, more or less divine, and
to ensure their survival after death, if not their immortality. And,
as we have just seen, the mysteries employ the classic pattern:
mystical death of the initiand, followed by a new, spiritual birth.

For the history of religion, the particular importance of the
Greco-Oriental mysteries lies in the fact that they illustrate the
need for a personal religious experience engaging man’s entire
existence, that is, to use Christian terminology, as including his
“salvation” in eternity. Such a personal religious experience could
not flourish in the framework of the public cults, whose principal
function was to ensure the sanctification of communal life and
the continuance of the State. In the great historical civilizations in
which the mysteries proliferated, we no longer find the situation
characteristic of primitive cultures; there, as we have noted more
than once, the initiations of the youth were at the same time an
occasion for the complete regeneration not only of the collectivity
but also of the cosmos. In the Hellenistic period we find an entirely
different situation; the immense success of the mysteries illustrates
the break between the religious elites and the religion of the State,
a break that Christianity will widen and, at least for a time, make
complete.®®

But for our present investigation the interest of the mysteries
lies in the fact that they demonstrate the perennial significance of the
traditional patterns of initiation and their capacity for being indef-

114 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

initely reanimated and enriched with new values. In the Hellenistic
world we find the same state of things that we observed in India;
an archaic pattern can be taken over and utilized for many various
spiritual ends, from mystical union with the Deity to the magical
conquest of immortality or the achievement of final deliverance,
nirvana. It is as if initiation and its patterns were indissolubly
linked with the very structure of spiritual life; as if initiation were
an indispensable process in every attempt at total regeneration, in
every effort to transcend man’s natural condition and attain to a
sanctified mode of being. Equally significant is the fact that the
imagery of the mysteries finally permeated an immense philosophi-
cal and spiritualistic literature, particularly in late antiquity. Homol-
ogizing philosophy to initiation had been a common motif even from
the beginnings of Pythagoreanism and Platonism. But the maieutic
procedure (from the root maia, “midwife”) by which Socrates
sought to “deliver” a new man had its prototype in archaic societies,
in the work of the masters of initiation; they too delivered neo-
phytes, that is, helped them to be born to spiritual life. Toward the
end of antiquity the motif of initiatory delivery was accompanied
by the theme of spiritual paternity, a theme ^ready documented
for Brahmanism and late Buddhism. (See pp. 53 ff.) St. Paul has
“spiritual sons,” sons whom he has engendered by faith.

But this is only a beginning. Though abstaining from revealing
the secrets of the various Hellenistic mysteries, many philosophers
and theosophists propounded allegorical interpretations of the initia-
tory rites. The majority of these interpretations referred the
rites of the mysteries to the successive stages through which the
human soul must pass in its ascent to God. Any acquaintance with
the works of lamblichus, Proclus, Synesius, Olympiodorus, as of
many other Neoplatonists or theosophists of the last centuries of
antiquity, suffices to show how completely they assimilated the
mystery initiations to a psychodrama through which the soul can
free itself from matter, attain regeneration, and take its flight to its
true home, the intelligible world. In making this assimilation these
writers were continuing a process of spiritual revaluation that had
already found expression in the mysteries of Eleusis. There too, at
a certain moment in history, an agricultural ritual had been charged
with new religious values. Though preserving its primitive agricul-
tural structure, the mystery no longer referred to the fertility of
the soil and the prosperity of the community, but to the spiritual
destiny of each individual mystes. The late commentators were

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

115

innovators only in the sense that they read their own spiritual
situations, determined by the profound crisis of their times, into
the ancient rites.

Hence it is doubtful if this enormous mass of hermeneutic writing
is of any service in an attempt to discover the original meaning of
the Eleusinian, Orphic, or Hellenistic mysteries. But if these allegor-
ical interpretations cannot put us in possession of historical realities,
they are nevertheless of considerable value. For such interpretations
characterize the. entire history of later syncretistic spirituality. It
was here that the countless Gnosticisms, both Christian and hetero-
dox, of the first centuries of our era found their ideologies, their
symbols, their key images. The touching drama of the human soul
blinded and wounded by forgetfulness of its true self was set forth
by Gnostic writers with the help of scenarios that finally derived
from philosophical exegesis of the mysteries. It was through these
syncretistic Gnosticisms that the interpretation of the Hellenistic
mysteries as a ritually guided experience of the regeneration of
the soul spread through Europe and into Asia. Certain aspects of
this mysteriosophy survived even quite late into the Middle Ages.
Finally the entire doctrine took on new life, in literary and philo-
sophical circles, through the rediscovery of Neoplatonism in the
Italy of the Renaissance.

Christianity and Initiation

From the end of the nineteenth century until about thirty years
ago, a number of scholars were convinced that they could explain
the origins of Christianity by a more or less direct influence from
the Greco-Oriental mysteries. Recent researches have not supported
these theories. On the contrary, it has even been suggested that the
renaissance of the mysteries in the first centuries of our era may
well be related to the rise and spread of Christianity; that certain
mysteries may well have reinterpreted their ancient rites in the
light of the new religious values contributed by Christianity.

It does not lie within our province to discuss all the aspects of
this problem.^^ However, we must make it clear that the presence
of one or another initiatory theme in primitive Christianity does
not necessarily imply the influence of the mystery religions. Such
a theme could have been taken directly from one of the esoteric
Jewish sects, especially the Essenes, concerning whom the Dead
Sea manuscripts have now added sensationally to our knowledge.^®
Indeed, it is not even necessary to suppose that an initiatory theme

116 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

was “borrowed” by Christianity from some other religion. As we
have said, initiation is coexistent with any new revaluation of
spiritual life. Hence there are two different problems involved,
which it would be dangerous to confuse. The first raises the question
of the initiatory elements (scenarios, ideology, terminology) in
primitive Christianity. The second concerns the possible historical
relations between Christianity and the mystery religions.

Let us begin by defining in what sense it is possible to speak of
initiatory elements in primitive Christianity. Obviously, Christian
baptism was from the first equivalent to an initiation. Baptism
introduced the convert to a new religious community and made
him worthy of eternal life. It is known that between 150 b.c. and
A.D. 300 there was a strong baptist movement in Palestine and
Syria. The Essenes too practiced ritual baths or baptisms. As
among the Christians, it was an initiatory rite; but, unlike the
Christians, the Essenes repeated their ritual baths periodically.
Hence it would be useless to seek a parallel to Christian baptism
in the lustration rites of the mysteries or other ceremonies of pagan
antiquity. Not oidy the Essenes but other Jewish movements were
familiar with it. But baptism could become a sacrament for the
earliest Christians precisely because it had been instituted by Christ.
In other words, the sacramental value of baptism derived from the
fact that the Christians saw Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God.

All this is already indicated by St. Paul (I Corinthians 10) and
developed in St. John’s Gospel: baptism is a free gift of God which
makes possible a new birth from water and the Spirit (John 1:5).
As we shall soon see, the symbolism of baptism is much enriched
after the third century. V/e shall then find borrowings from the
language and imagery of the mysteries. But none of these borrow-
ings occurs in primitive Christianity.

Another cult act whose structure is initiatory is the Eucharist,
instituted by Jesus at the Last Supper. Through the Eucharist the
Christian shares in the body and blood of the I^rd. Ritual banquets
were frequent in the mysteries, but the historical precedents for
the Last Supper are not to be sought so far away. The Qumran texts
have shown that the Essenes regarded meals taken in common as
an anticipation of the Messianic Banquet. As Krister Stendhal
points out, this idea is also found in the Gospels: “. . . Many will
come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 8: 2). But here
there is a new idea: the Christians regarded Jesus as already risen

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS 117

from the dead and raised to Heaven, whereas the Essenes awaited
the resurrection of the Teacher of Righteousness as priestly Messiah
together with the anointed of Israel. Even more important is the
fact that, for the Christians, the Eucharist depended on a historical
person and a historical event (Jesus and the Last Supper), but
we do not find in the Qumran texts any redemptory significance
accorded to a historical person.-^®

Thus we see in what sense primitive Christianity contained initi-
atory elements. On the one hand, baptism and the Eucharist sanc-
tified the believer by radically changing his existential status. On
the other hand, the sacraments separated him from the mass of
the “profane” and made him part of a community of the elect.
The initiatory organization of the community was already highly
developed among the Essenes. Just as the Christians called them-
selves saints and “the chosen,” the Essenes regarded themselves
as initiates. Both were conscious that the virtue of their initiation
set them apart from the rest of society.

The Qumran texts help us better to understand the historical
context of the message of Jesus and of the development of the
earliest Christian communities. We realize to what an extent primi-
tive Christianity was bound up with the history of Israel and the
hopes of the Jewish people. But even so, it is impossible not to
realize all that distinguishes Christianity from the Essenes and in
general from all other contemporary esoteric cults. Above all,
there is the feeling of joy and newness. As has been pointed out,
the terms designating newness and joy are characteristic of primitive
Christian language.^^ The newness of Christianity is constituted by
the historicity of Jesus; and the joy springs from certainty of his
resurrection. For the earliest Christian communities, the resurrection
of Jesus could not be identified with the periodic death and resurrec-
tion of the God of the mysteries. Like Christ’s life, suffering, and
death, his resurrection had occurred in history, “in the days of
Pontius Pilate.” The resurrection was an irreversible event; it was
not repeated yearly, like the resurrection of Adonis, for example.
It was not an allegory of the sanctity of cosmic life, as was the case
with the so-called vegetation Gods, nor an initiatory scenario, as
in the mysteries. It was a “sign” that formed part of the Messianic
expectation of the Jewish people, and as such it had its place in
the religious history of Israel, for the resurrection of the dead was
an accompaniment of the coming of the Time. The resurrection of

118

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

Jesus proclaimed that the last age (the eschaton) had begun. As
St. Paul says, Jesus was resurrected as “the firstborn from the
dead” (Colossians 1: 18). This explains the belief which we find
recorded in the Gospels, that many resurrections followed that of
Jesus: “The graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints
which slept arose” (Matthew 27: 52). For the earliest Christians,
the resurrection established a new era of history — the validation of
Jesus as Messiah, and hence the spiritual transmutation of man and
the total renewal of the world. This, of course, constituted a “mys-
tery,” but a mystery that was to be “proclaimed upon the house-
tops.” And initiation into the Christian mystery was open to all.

In short, the initiatory elements in primitive Christianity simply
demonstrate once again that initiation is an inseparable element in
any revaluation of the religious life. It is impossible to attain to a
higher mode of being, it is impossible to participate in a new irrup-
tion of sanctity into the world or into history, except by dying to pro-
fane, unenlightened existence and being reborn to a new, regenerated
life. In view of the “inevitability” of initiation, it is surprising that we
find so little trace of initiatory scenarios and terminology in primitive
Christianity. St. Paul never uses telete, a specific technical term of
the mysteries. It is true that he uses mysterion, but in the sense given
it in the Septuagint, that is, “secret.”^® In the New Testament, mys-
terion does not refer to a cult act, as it does in the ancient religions.
For St. Paul, the mystery is God’s secret, that is, his decision to save
man through his Son, Jesus Christ. The reference, then, is basically
to the mystery of redemption. But redemption is an idea that is
incomprehensible except in the context of the Biblical tradition;
it is only in that tradition that man, originally the son of God, had
lost this privileged station by his sin.®^

Jesus speaks of the “mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven” (Mat-
thew 13: 11; Mark 4: 11; Luke 8: 10), but the expression is only
the counterpart of the “king’s secret” of the Old Testament (Tobit
12: 7). In this sense, the mysteries concern the kingdom that
Jesus opens to believers. The mysteries of the kingdom of heaven
are the “secret counsels” that a king communicates only to his
familiars (Judith 2: 2) and hides from others in the form of
parables so that “they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not”
(Matthew 13: 13). In conclusion, although Jesus’ message also has
an initiatory structure — and has it precisely because initiation is an
integral part of any new religious revelation — there is no reason to

PATTERNS OF INITUTION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS 1 19

suppose that primitive Christianity was influenced by the Hellen-
istic mysteries.

But with the spread of Christianity into all the provinces of the
Roman Empire, especially after its final triumph under Constantine,
there is a gradual change in perspective. The more that Christianity
becomes a universalistic religion, the more its historicity recedes into
the background. This does not mean that the Church abandons the
historicity of Christ, as was done by certain Christian heresies and
by Gnosticism. But by becoming paradigmatic for the entire
inhabited world, the Christian message tended more and more to
be couched in ecumenical terms. Primitive Christianity was bound
up with a local history, that of Israel. From a certain point of view,
any local history is in danger of provincialism. When a local history
becomes sacred and at the same time exemplary, that is, a paradigm
for the salvation of all humanity, it demands expression in a
universally understandable language. But the only universal re-
ligious language is the language of symbols. The Christian writers
will increasingly turn to symbols to make the mysteries of the
Gospel intelligible. But the Roman Empire had two universalistic
spiritual movements, that is, movements not confined within the
frontiers of a local culture: the mysteries and philosophy. Victori-
ous Christianity borrowed from both the former and the latter.
Hence we find a threefold process of enrichment of primitive
Christianity: (1) by archaic symbols which will be rediscovered
and revalued by being given new Christological meanings; (2) by
borrowing from the imagery and initiatory themes of the mysteries;
(3) by the assimilation of Greek philosophy.

For our purpose, all that is pertinent is the incorporation of
initiatory motifs into victorious Christianity. But we must refer in
passing to the Church Fathers’ use of archaic and universally dis-
seminated symbols. For example, we find the symbols of the Cosmic
Tree and of the center of the world incorporated into the symbolism
of the Cross. The Cross is described as a “tree rising from earth to
Heaven,” as “the Tree of Life planted on Calvary,” the tree that
“springing from the depths of the Earth, rose to Heaven and
sanctifies the uttermost bounds of the universe.”^® In other words,
in order to convey the mystery of universal redemption through the
Cross, Christian writers used not only the symbols of the Old
Testament and the ancient Near East (reference to the Tree of
Life) but also the archaic symbols of the Cosmic Tree set at the
center of the world and ensuring communication between Heaven

120 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

and earth. The Cross was the visible sign of the redemption ac-
complished by Jesus Christ; hence it must replace the ancient
symbols of elevation to Heaven. And since the redemption extended
to the whole of humanity, the Cross had to be set at the center of
the world, that it might sanctify the entire universe.

As for baptism, the Fathers emphasize its initiatory function
more and more plastically by multiplying images of death and
resurrection. The baptismal font is compared to both the tomb and
the woipb; it is the tomb in which the catechumen buries his earthly
life and the womb in which the life eternal is born.^^ The homologi-
zation of prenatal existence both to immersion in the water of bap-
tism and to initiatory death is clearly expressed in a Syrian liturgy:
“And so, O Father, Jesus lived, through thy will and the will of the
Holy Ghost, in three earthly dwellings: in the womb of the flesh,
in the womb of the baptismal water, and in the somber caverns of
the underworld.”^^ It could be said that in this case there was an
effort to reconsecrate an archaic initiatory theme by linking it
directly with the life and death of Jesus.

But from the third century, and especially after the fourth, bor-
rowings from the language and imagery of the mysteries become
frequent. The initiatory motifs of Neoplatonism had already entered
the writing of the Fathers by their assimilation of Greek philo-
sophical terminology. Addressing the pagans, Clement of Alex-
andria uses the language of the mysteries: “O truly sacred mys-
teries! O pure light! In the blaze of the torches I have a vision of
heaven and of God. I become holy by initiation.”^®

By the fourth century, the constitution of the arcana disciplina,
the “secret teaching,” is complete; in other words, the idea that the
Christian mysteries are to be guarded from the uninitiated finally
triumphs. As Father Hugo Rahner expresses it, “The mysteries of
baptism and of the sacrificial altar were surrounded with a ritual
of awe and secrecy, and soon the iconostasis concealed the holy of
holies from the eyes of the noninitiate: these became . . . ‘mysteries
that make men freeze with awe." ‘This is known to the initiates’ is a
phrase running through all the Greek sermons, and as late a
writer as the Pseudo-Areopagite warns the Christian initiate who
has experienced the divine mystagogy to keep silence: ‘Take care
that you do not reveal the holy of holies, preserve the mysteries of
the hidden God so that the profane may not partake of them and
in your sacred illuminations speak of the sacred only to saints.’

What we find, in short, is a sublimation of the initiatory themes

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

121

of the mysteries. This process was possible because it formed part
of a larger movement — the Christianization of the religious and
cultural traditions of the ancient world. As is well known, Chris-
tianity in its triumph had finally appropriated not only Greek phi-
losophy, but the essentials of Roman juridical institutions, and the
Oriental ideology of the Sovereign Cosmocrator, but also the whole
immemorial heritage of Gods and Heroes, of popular rites and
customs, especially the cults of the dead and fertility rituals. This
wholesale assimilation was due to the very dialectics of Christianity.
As a universalistic religion, Christianity was obliged to homologize
and find a common denominator for all the religious and cultural
“provincialisms” of the known world. This grandiose unification
could be accomplished only by translating into Christian terms all
the forms, figures, and values that were to be homologized.

For our purpose it is important to note that, together with Neo-
platonic philosophy, the first values to be accepted by Christianity
were the initiatory themes and the imagery of the mysteries. Chris-
tianity took the place of the mysteries, as it took the place of the
other religious forms of antiquity. The Christian initiation could
not coexist with initiations into the mysteries. Otherwise the re-
ligion that sought to preserve at least the historicity of Christ would
have been in grave danger of becoming indistinguishably confused
with the countless syncretistic Gnosticisms and religions. The in-
tolerance of Christianity in its hour of triumph is the most striking
proof that no confusion with the Hellenistic mysteries was possible.
For the fact is that even Christianity, a revealed religion which
did not originally imply any secret rite, which had proclaimed and
propagated itself in the broad light of day and for all men, came
in the end to borrow from the liturgies and the vocabulary of the
Hellenistic mysteries. Morphologically speaking, Christianity too
comprises an initiatory pattern — if only by the fact that baptism
symbolizes the catechumen’s mystical death and resurrection in
Christ. It would be needless to insist on the radical differences in
religious content that separate the Christian mysterion from the
Hellenistic mysteries; for, as the result of a succession of profound
and thoroughly documented studies, those differences are today
clear. But in estimating the role and the importance of initiation
in the religious life of humanity, it is not without interest to record
the fact that certain initiatory themes were taken over and re-
valuated by Christianity.

122

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

Survival of Initiatory Motifs in Christian Europe

The final triumph of Christianity put an end to the mysteries
and to the initiatory Gnosis. The spiritual regeneration previously
sought in initiations into the mysteries was now obtained through
the Christian sacraments. But certain patterns of initiation, more
or less Christianized, continued to survive for many centuries. We
here touch the circumference of a problem of some magnitude,
which has not yet been adequately studied — the survival and suc-
cessive transformations of initiatory scenarios in Christian Europe
from the Middle Ages down to modern times. Since we cannot go
into the problem in its entirety, let us content ourselves with taking
a bird’s-eye view of it. To begin with, it is important to observe
in what forms Europe has preserved the various types of initiations
that we have studied in these chapters; for they did not always
survive as rites properly speaking, .but more especially in the form
of folk customs, of games, and of literary motifs. In general, the
initiations which succeeded in preserving their ritual reality are
puberty ceremonies. Throughout almost all of rural Europe, and
down to the end of the nineteenth century, the ceremonies marking
the passage from one age class to the next still reproduced certain
themes characteristic of traditional puberty initiations. The incor-
poration of the boys into the group of youths always implied a
‘‘transition rite” and a certain number of initiatory ordeals. If the
symbolism of death and resurrection is in most cases almost for-
gotten, the initiatory structure of the ordeals has been fairly well
preserved. It has further been shown that the initiatory constitution
of men’s secret societies of pre-Christian times was continued in
the more or less military organizations of the youth, in their sym-
bols and secret traditions, their entrance rites, their peculiar dances
(for example the sword dance and others), and even their cos-
tumes.^® So too we can glimpse an ancient initiatory pattern in
the ceremonial of the artisans’ guilds, especially in the Middle Ages.
The apprentice had to spend a certain period of time with his
master. He learned the “secrets of the profession,” the traditions
of the corporation, the symbolism of his trade. Apprenticeship in-
cluded a certain number of trials, and the novice’s promotion to
active membership in the corporation was accompanied by a vow
of secrecy. Traces of ancient initiatory scenarios are still dis-
cernible in the rites peculiar to masons and blacksmiths, especially
in Eastern Europe.^®

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

123

These few examples illustrate the different modes of survival of
initiatory rites in Christian Europe; for, whatever the degree to
which they were desacralized, all these ceremonies can still be
regarded as rites: they involve ordeals, special teaching, and, above
all, secrecy. Beside this group of survivals, we must cite a certain
number of popular customs, which were very probably derived
from pre-Christian initiatory scenarios, but whose original meaning
has been forgotten in the course of time, and which, furthermore,
underwent strong ecclesiastical pressure for their Christianization.
Among these popular customs of a complexion suggesting the
mysteries, first place must go to the masquerades and dramatic
ceremonies that accompany the Christian winter festivals, which
take place between Christmas and Carnival.

But there are also cases in which certain initiatory patterns have
been preserved in strictly closed milieux, leading an almost
clandestine existence. Alchemy deserves special mention. It is
important not only because it has preserved and transmitted the
Hermetic doctrines of late antiquity but also for the role that it
played in the history of Western culture. Now it is significant that
in the work of the alchemists {opus alchymicum) we find the an-
cient pattern of initiatory torture, death, and resurrection; but this
time it is applied on an entirely different plane of experience — that
of experimentation with mineral substance. To transmute it, the
alchemists treat matter as the Gods — and, consequently, the ini-
tiarids — were treated in the Hellenistic mysteries: the mineral sub-
stances suffer, die, and are reborn to another mode of being, that is,
are transmuted. Zosimus, one of the most important alchemists of
the Hellenistic period, relates a vision that he had in a dream: a per-
sonage named Ion reveals to him that he (Ion) has been pierced
by a sword, cut to pieces, beheaded, flayed, burned in fire, and
that he suffered all this “in order that he could change his body
into spirit.” On awakening, Zosimus wonders if all that he saw in
his dream was not related to a certain alchemical process.^^ In
Ion’s torture and cutting to pieces it is easy to recognize the
pattern characteristic of shamanic initiations. But now it is not the
postulant who suffers the initiatory torture, but a mineral sub-
stance, and it does so in order to change its modality, to be
transmuted.

In the course of the opus alchymicum, we come upon other initia-
tory motifs; thus, for example, the phase named nigredo corre-
sponds to the “death” of the mineral substances, to their dissolution

124

RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INUTATION

or putrefaction, in short to their reduction to the prime matter.
In some texts by late Western alchemists the reduction of sub-
stances to the prime matter is homologized with a return to the
womb. All these phases of the opus alchymicum seem to indicate not
only the stages of a process of transmutation of the mineral sub-
stances but also the inner experiences of the alchemist himself.
There is a synchronism between the alchemical operations and the
alchemist’s mysterious experiences, which end by effecting his com-
plete regeneration. As Gichtel said in regard to the operation albedo:
“with this regeneration we receive not only a new soul, but a new
body. . .

All this would demand development and a detailed examination
which space does not permit. But at least these few remarks were
necessary to show that, through alchemy, certain initiatory patterns
of archaic structure survived in Europe even down to the dawn of
modern time — nay, more, that the alchemists employed these
initiatory processes in order to realize their grandiose dream of
mineral transmutation, that is, of the “perfecting” of metals through
their spiritualization, through their final transformation into gold;
for gold was the only perfect metal, the only one that, on the level
of mineral existence, corresponded to the divine perfectior^. From
a Christian point of view, we could say that the alchemists were
striving to deliver nature from the consequence of the “fall,” in
short, to save it. In setting about this ambitious task of cosmic
soteriology, the alchemists employed the classic scenario of all tra-
ditional initiation — death and resurrection of the mineral sub-
stances in order to regenerate them.

Patterns of Initiation and Literary Themes

It is probable that during the Middle Ages other types of initia-
tions were performed in small closed circles. We find symbols and
allusions to initiatory rites in the trials of the Knights Templars
or of other so-called heretics and even in the trials of witches. But
these initiations, in so far as they were still really practiced, affected
only restricted circles surrounded by the deepest secrecy. We wit-
ness, if not the total disappearance of initiations, at least their
almost final eclipse. All the more interesting, then, I think, is the
presence of a considerable number of initiatory motifs in the lit-
erature that, from the twelfth century, grew up around the "'Matiire
de Bretagne,** especially in the romance giving a leading role to
Arthur, the Fisher King, Percival, and other Heroes pursuing the

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

125

Grail quest. The Celtic origin of the motifs of the Arthurian cycle
appears to be accepted today by the majority of scholars. George
Lyman Kittredge, Arthur Brown, Roger Sherman Loomis, to
cite only some American scholars, have abundantly demonstrated
the continuity between the themes and figures of Celtic mythology
— as still to be seen in Welsh and Irish tales — and the Arthurian
personages. Now it is important to note that most of these scenarios
are initiatory; there is always a long and eventful quest for mar-
velous objects, a quest which, among other things, implies the
Heroes’ entering the other world. To what extent this Matter of
Britain contained not only remnants of Celtic mythology but also
the memory of real rites it is difficult to decide. In the rules for
admission into the company led by Arthur, we can decipher certain
ordeals for entrance into a secret society of the Mdnnerbund type.

But for our purpose, it is the proliferation of initiatory symbols
and motifs in the Arthurian romances which is significant. In the
Grail Castle, Percival has to spend the night in a chapel in which
lies a dead knight; thunder roUs, and he sees a black hand ex-
tinguishing the only lighted candle.®^ This is the very type of the
initiatory night watch. The ordeals that the Heroes undergo are
innumerable — they have to cross a bridge that sinks under water
or is made of a sharp sword or is guarded by lions and monsters.
In addition, the gates to castles are guarded by animated autom-
atons, fairies, or demons. All these scenarios suggest passage
to the beyond, the perilous descents to Hell; and when such jour-
neys are undertaken by living beings, they always form part of an
initiation. By assuming the risks of such a descent to Hell, the Hero
pursues the conquest of immortality or some other equally extraor-
dinary end. The countless ordeals undergone by the personages of
the Arthurian cycle fall in the same category; at the end of their
quest, the Heroes cure the king’s mysterious malady and thereby
regenerate the “Waste Land,” or even themselves attain sovereignty.
Now it is well known that the function of sovereignty is generally
bound up with an initiatory ritual.

All this literature with its abundance of initiatory motifs and
scenarios®^ is most valuable for our purpose because of its popular
success. The fact that people listened with delight to romantic
tales in which initiatory cliches occurred to satiety proves, I think,
that such adventures provided the answer to a profound need in
- medieval man. It was only his imagination which was fed by these
initiatory scenarios; but the life of the imagination, like the life of

126 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

a dream, is as important for the whole psyche of the human being
as is daily life. We here touch upon a problem that is beyond the
competence of the historian of religion, for it belongs by right to
psychology. But I must touch upon it, in order that we may under-
stand what happened to the majority of initiatory patterns when they
had lost their ritual reality; they became what, for example, we
find them to be in the Arthurian romances — literary motifs. This
is as much as to say that they now deliver their spiritual message on
a different plane of human experience, by addressing themselves
directly to the imagination. Something similar had taken place,
and long before, with fairy tales. Paul Saintyves attempted to show
that a certain category of fairy tales is initiatory in structure (and,
he added, in origin). Other folklorists have taken up the same
thesis, and recently the Dutch Germanist Jan de Vries has brought
out the initiatory elements in sagas and fairy tales.®^ Whatever side
one may take in this controversy on the origin and meaning of
fairy tales, it is impossible to deny that the ordeals and adventures
of Aeir heroes and heroines are almost always translatable into
initiatory terms. Now this to me seems of the utmost importance:
from the time — which it is so difficult to determine — ^when fairy
tales took shape as such, men, both primitive and civilized alike,
have listened to them with a pleasure susceptible of indefinite repeti-
tion. This amounts to saying that initiatory scenarios — even camou-
flaged, as they are in fairy tales — are the expression of a psycho-
drama that answers a deep need in the human being. Every man
wants to experience certain perilous situations, to confront excep-
tional ordeals, to make his way into the Other World — and he
experiences all this, on the level of his imaginative life, by hearing
or reading fairy tales, or, on the level of his dream life, by dreaming.

Another phenomenon that, though apparently chiefly literary,
also probably comprised an initiatory organization is the Fedeli
d* Amove Representatives of the movement are documented in
the thirteenth century in Provence and Italy as well as in France
and Belgium. The Fedeli d' Amove constituted a secret and spiritual
militia, devoted to the cult of the “One Woman” and to initiation
into the mystery of “Love.” They all used a “hidden language”
iparlar cruz) so that their doctrine should not be accessible to “/a
gente gro^a,” to use the expression of one of the most famous Fedeli,
Francesco da Barberino (1264-1348). Another fedele d*amore,
Jacques de Baisieux, in his poem C*est des fiez d* amours, lays it down
that the iedele “must not reveal Love’s counsels, but hide them with

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

127

care.”®* That initiation through Love was spiritual in nature is clear
from Jacques de Baisieux’s interpretation of the word amor:

A senefie en sa partie

Sans, et mor senefie mort;

Or I’assemblons, s’aurons sans mortJ^^

“Woman” symbolizes the transcendent intellect, Wisdom. Love
of a woman awakens the adept from the lethargy into which the
Christian world had fallen because of the spiritual unworthiness
of the pope. In the writings of the Fedeli d* A more we find allusions
to a “widow who is no widow”; this is Madonna Intelligenza, who
was left a widow because her husband, the pope, died to spiritual
life by devoting himself entirely to things temporal.

Strictly speaking, this is not a heretical movement, but simply a
secret group that no longer accorded the pope the status of spiritual
leader of Christianity. We know nothing of their initiation rites;
but they must have had such rites, for the Fedeli d* A more consti-
tuted a militia and held secret meetings. But they are chiefly
important because they illustrate a phenomenon that will become
more marked later — the communication of a secret spiritual
message through literature. Dante is the most famous example of
this tendency — ^which already anticipates the modern world — ^to
consider art, and especially literature, the paradigmatic method of
communicating a theology, a metaphysics, and even a soteriology.

These few remarks help us to understand what initiatory patterns
have become in the modern world — meaning by the term “modern
world” the various categories of individuals who no longer have
any religious experience properly speaking and who live a de-
sacralized existence in a desacralized world. An attentive analysis
of their behavior, beliefs, and ideals could reveal a whole camou-
flaged mythology and fragments of a forgotten or degraded religion.
Nor is this surprising, for it was as homo religiosus that man first
became conscious of his own mode of being. Whether he wants to
or not, the nonreligious man of modern times continues the behavior
patterns, the beliefs, and the language of homo religiosus — though
at the same time he desacralizes them, empties them of their
original meanings. It could be shown, for example, that the festivals
and celebrations of a nonreli^ous, or ostensibly nonreligious so-
ciety, its public ceremonies, spectacles, sports competitions, youth
organizations, propaganda by pictures and slogans, literature for
mass popular consumption — all still preserve the structure of myths.

128 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

of symbols, of rites, although they have been emptied of their re-
ligious content.*^® But there is yet more: the imaginative activity and
the dream experiences of modern man continue to be pervaded by
religious symbols, figures, and themes. As some psychologists de-
light in repeating, the unconscious is religious.®^ From one point
of view it could be said that in the man of*desacralized societies,
religion has become “unconscious”; it lies buried in the deepest
strata of his being; but this by no means implies that it does not
continue to perform an essential function in the economy of the
psyche.

To return to patterns of initiation: we can still recognize them,
together with other structures of religious experience, in the
imaginative and dream life of modem man. But we recognize
them too in certain types of real ordeals that he undergoes — in
the spiritual crises, the solitude and despair through which
every human being must pass in order to attain to a responsible,
genuine, and creative life. Even if the initiatory character of these
ordeals is not apprehended as such, it remains true nonetheless
that man becomes himself only after having solved a series of
desperately difficult and even dangerous situations; that is, after
having undergone “tortures” and “death,” followed by an awaken-
ing to another life, qualitatively different because regenerated. If
we look closely, we see that every human life is made up of a series
of ordeals, of “deaths,” and of “resurrections.” It is true that in
the case of modern man, since there is no longer any religious
experience fully and consciously assumed, initiation no longer
performs an ontological function; it no longer includes a radical
change in the initiand’s mode of being, or his salvation. The
initiatory scenarios function only on the vital and psychological
planes. Nevertheless, they continue to function, and that is why I
said that the process of initiation seems to be co-existent with any
and every human condition.

Concluding Remarks

We have reached the end of our investigation; let us cast a back-
ward look over the road that we have traveled. We have seen that
the various types of initiations can be classed in two categories:
first, puberty rites, by virtue of which adolescents gain access to
the sacred, to knowledge, and to sexuality — ^by which, in short,
they become human beings\ second, specidized initiations, which
certain individuals undergo in order to transcend their human con-

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS 129

dition and become proteges of the Supernatural Beings or even
their equals. We also saw that, though it can avail itself of certain
patterns that are in some sort its peculiar property, this second
category of initiations generally employs the patterns typical of
puberty rites. Since we cannot here present the geographical dis-
tribution'"^* of these two categories of initiations, nor outline their
respective histories, we shall confine ourselves to reviewing certain
conclusions that follow from our investigation.

1. Although puberty rites among primitives are generally associ-
ated with the bull-roarer and circumcision, this is not always the
case. From this we may conclude that initiation constitutes an
autonomous and unique phenomenon, which can exist — and in
fact does exist — without the corporal mutilations and the dramatic
rites that are habitually associated with it.

2. Puberty initiations have an immense dissemination and
are documented for the most archaic peoples — ^Australians,
Fuegians, Californians, Bushmen, Hottentots, among others. How-
ever, there are primitive societies in which puberty rites apparently
do not exist or are extremely rudimentary; such, for example, is
the case with certain Arctic and north Asian peoples. But the re-
ligious life of these peoples is dominated -by shamanism, and, as
we have seen, one becomes a shaman by means of a long and
sometimes dramatic initiation. Similarly, although in our day
puberty rites have almost disappeared in Polynesia, secret societies
flourish there; and these always employ initiatory scenarios.
It follows that, in one way or another, initiatory rites are
universally disseminated in the primitive world, whether in the
form of age-grading ceremonies, of rites for entrance into secret
societies, or, finally, of initiatory ordeals requisite for the realiza-
tion of a mystical vocation.

3. In the eyes of those who perform them, initiations are be-
lieved to have been revealed by Divine or Supernatural Beings.
Hence the initiatory ceremony is an imitation of the Gods; by
performing it, one lives the sacred primordial Time again and the
neophytes, together with all the initiates, participate in the presence
of the Gods or m)rthical Ancestors. Initiation, then, is a recapitula-
tion of the sacred history of the world and the tribe. On the occasion
of the age-grading of adolescents, the entire society is plunged back
into the mythical Times of origin and therefore emerges regen-
erated.

4. Initiatory scenarios differ markedly; we need only compare

130 RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

the simplicity of the Kumai initiation with similar Australian or
Melanesian ceremonies. Some types of puberty initiations are or-
ganically related to certain cultures; we had occasion to show the
structural connection between one or another initiatory motif and
hunting or agricultural societies. Like every other cultural fact,
the phenomenon of initiation is also a historical fact. In other
words, the concrete expressions of initiation are related both to the
structure of the respective society and to its history. On the other
hand,« initiation implies an existential experience — the experience
of ritual death and the revelation of the sacred; that is, it exhibits
a dimension that is metacultural and transhistorical. This is why
the same initiatory patterns continue to be active in culturally
heterogeneous societies. Certain scenarios of the Greco-Oriental
mysteries are already documented in cultures as primitive as those
of the Australians or the Africans.

5. For the reader’s convenience, we may here again mention
the initiatory patterns that are distinguished by their frequency and
their wide dissemination: (a) the simplest patterns, comprising
only the neophyte’s separation from his mother and his introduction
to the sacred; (b) the most dramatic pattern, comprising circum-
cision, ordeals, tortures, that is, a symbolic dea^ followed by
resurrection; (c) the pattern in which the idea of death is replaced
by the idea of a new gestation followed by a new birth, and in
which the initiation is expressed principally in embryological and
gynecological terms; (d) the pattern whose essential element is
individual withdrawal into the wilderness and the quest for a pro-
tecting spirit; (e) the pattern peculiar to heroic initiations, in
which the emphasis falls on victory gained by magical methods
(e.g., metamorphosis into a wild beast, frenzy, etc.) ; (f ) the pattern
characteristic of the initiations of shamans and other specialists
in the sacred, comprising both a descent to Hell and an ascension
to Heaven (essential themes: dismemberment of the body and re-
newal of the viscera, climbing trees); (g) the pattern that we may
can ^'paradoxical,” because its principal feature is ordeals that
are inconceivable on the level of human experience (ordeals of the
Symplegades type). It is true that these Symplegades ordeals are
in some sort a part of all the foregoing patterns (except, of course,
the first); yet it is justifiable to speak of a paradoxical pattern,
since this pattern is capable of being detached from the ritual com-
plex and, as a symbol, fulfilling an important function in myths
and folklores: particularly the function of revealing the structures
of ultimate reality and of spirit

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS 131

6. As we saw, several patterns of initiation can coexist in the
same culture. Such a plurality of patterns can be explained his-
torically by the successive influences that have in the course of
time been exercised on the culture. But consideration must also
be given to the metacultural character of initiation; the same initia-
tory patterns are found in the dreams and the imaginative life both
of modern man and of the primitive. To repeat: we are dealing with
an existential experience that is basic in the human condition. This
is why it is always possible to revive archaic patterns of initiation
in highly evolved societies.

7. We cannot say that there is “evolution” when one pattern
gives place to another, nor that a pattern derives genetically from
the one that preceded it, nor, finally, that some particular pattern
is superior to all others. Each represents a creation that is self-
sufficient. Nevertheless, this fact is to be noted: the dramatic in-
tensity of initiatory scenarios increases in more complex cultures;
elaborate rites, masks, and cruel or terrifying ordeals make their
appearance in similar cultures. The purpose of all these innovations
is to make the experience of ritual death more intense.

8. We find initiatory death already justified in archaic cultures
by an origin myth that can be summarized as follows: a Super-
natural Being had attempted to renew men by killing them in order
to bring them to life again “changed”; for one reason or another,
men slew this Supernatural Being, but they later celebrated secret
rites inspired by this drama; more precisely, the violent death
of the Supernatural Being became the central mystery, reactualized
on the occasion of each new initiation. Initiatory death is thus the
repetition of the death of the Supernatural Being, the founder of
the mystery. Since the primordial drama is repeated during initia-
tion, the participants in an initiation also imitate the fate of the
Supernatural Being: his death by violence. By virtue of this ritual
anticipation, death, too, is itself sanctified, that is, is charged with
a religious value. Death is valuated as an essential moment in the
existence of the Supernatural Being. By dying ritually, the initiate
shares in the supernatural condition of the founder of the mystery.
Through this valuation, death and initiation become interchange-
able. And this, in sum, amounts to saying that concrete death is
finally assimilated to a transition rite toward a higher condition.
Initiatory death becomes the sine qua non for all spiritual regenera-
tion and, finally, for the survival of the soul and even for its im-
mortality. And one of the most important consequences that the
rites and ideology of initiation have had in the history of humani^

132 rites and symbols of initiation

is that this religious valuation of ritual death finally led to con-
quest of the fear of real death, and to belief in the possibility of a
purely spiritual survival for the human being.

It must never be forgotten that initiatory death simultaneously
signifies the end of the “natural,” noncultural man, and passage
to a new modality of existence — that of a being “born to spirit,”
that is, a being that does not live solely in an immediate reality.
Thus initiatory death forms an integral part of the mystical process
by which the novice becomes another, fashioned in accordance with
the model revealed by the Gods or the mythical Ancestors. This
is as much as to say that one becomes truly a man in proportion
as one ceases to be a natural man and resembles a Supernatural
Being.

The interest of initiation for an understanding of archaic men-
tality lies predominantly in its showing us that the true man — ^the
spiritual man — is not given, is not the result of a natural process.
He is “made” by the old masters, in accordance with the models
revealed by the Divine Beings and preserved in the myths. These
old masters constitute the spiritual elites of archaic societies. It is
they who know, who know the world of spirit, the truly human
world. Their function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence
to the new generations and to help them assume the responsibility
of being truly men and hence of participating in culture. But since
for archaic societies “culture” is the sum of the values received
from Supernatural Beings, the function of initiation may be re-
duced to this: to each new generation, it reveals a world open to
the transhuman, a world that, in our philosophical terminology, we
should call transcendental.

Epilogue

As we saw, modem man no longer has any initiation of the
traditional type. Certain initiatory themes survive in Christianity;
but the various Christian denominations no longer regard them as
possessing the values of initiation. The rituals, imagery, and ter-
minology borrowed from the mysteries of late antiquity have lost
their initiatory aura; for fifteen centuries they have formed an
integral part of the symbolism and ceremonial of the Church.

This is not to say that there have not existed, and do not still
exist, small groups seeking to revive the “esoteric” meaning of the
institutions of the Catholic Church. The attempt of the writer J. K.
Huysmans is the best known, but his is not the only one. These

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

133

efforts have met with almost no response outside of the re-
stricted circles of writers and amateur occultists. It is true that for
the past thirty years or so Catholic authorities have shown much
interest in images, symbols, and myths. But this is due primarily
to the revival of the liturgical movement, to the renewed interest in
Greek patrology, and to the increasing importance accorded to mys-
tical experience. None of these trends was initiated by an esoteric
group. On the contrary, the Roman Church quite visibly has the
same desire to live in history and to prepare its adherents to face the
problems of contemporary history as the Protestant churches have.
If many Catholic priests are far more interested in the study of
symbols today than Catholic priests in general were thirty years
ago, it is not in the sense in which Huysmans and his friends were
interested, but in order the better to understand the difficulties
and crises of their parishioners. It is for the same reason that psy-
choanalysis is increasingly studied, and applied, by the clergy of
various Christian denominations.

To be sure, we find today a considerable number of occult sects,
secret societies, pseudo-initiatory groups, hermetistic or neospirit-
ualistic movements, and the like. The Theosophical Society, An-
throposophy, Neo-Vedantism, Neo-Buddhism are merely the
best-known expressions of a cultural phenomenon found almost
everywhere in the Western world. It is no new phenomenon. In-
terest in occultism, accompanied by a tendency to form more or
less secret societies or groups, already appears in Europe in the
sixteenth century and reaches its height in the eighteenth. The
only secret movement that exhibits a certain ideological consistency,
that already has a history, and that enjoys social and political
prestige is Freemasonry. The other self-styled initiatory organiza-
tions are for the most part recent and hybrid improvisations. Their
interest is chiefly sociological and psychological; they illustrate
the disorientation of a part of the modem world, the desire to find
a substitute for religious faith. They also illustrate the indomitable
inclination toward the mysteries, the occult, the beyond — an in-
clination that is an integral part of the human being and that is
found in all ages on all levels of culture, especially in periods of
crisis.

Not all the secret and esoteric organizations of the modem world
include entrance rites or initiation ceremonies. Initiation is usually
reduced to instmction obtained from a book. (The number of
initiatory books and periodicals published throughout the world

134

RITES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

is amazing.) As for occult groups requiring a formal initiation,
what little is known about them shows that their “rites” are either
sheer inventions or are inspired by certain books supposed to con-
tain precious revelations concerning the initiations of antiquity.
These so-called initiation rites frequently betoken a deplorable
spiritual poverty. The fact that those who practice them can regard
them as infallible means of attaining to supreme gnosis shows to
what a degree modern man has lost all sense of traditional initiation.
But the success of these enterprises likewise proves man’s pro-
found need for initiation, that is, for regeneration, for participation
in the life of spirit. From one point of view, the pseudo-initiatory
sects and groups perform a positive function, since they help
modern man to find a spiritual meaning for his drastically de-
sacralized existence. A psychologist would even say that the ex-
treme spuriousness of these pretended initiation rites is of little sig-
nificance, the important fact being that the deep psyche of the
participant regains a certain equilibrium through them.

The majority of the pseudo-occult groups are hopelessly sterile.
No important cultural creation whatever can be credited to them.
On the contrary, the few modern works in which initiatory themes
are discernible — ^James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land — ^were created by writers and artists who make no claim to
have been initiated and who belong to no occult circle.

And so we come back to the problem on which we touched
earlier — ^that initiatory themes remain alive chiefly in modern
man’s unconscious. This is confirmed not only by the initiatory
symbolism of certain artistic creations — ^poeihs, novels, works of
plastic art, films — ^but also by their public reception. Such a
massive and spontaneous acceptance proves, it seems to us, that
in the depth of his being modern man is still capable of being
affected by initiatory scenarios or messages. Initiatory motifs are
even to be found in the terminology used to interpret these works.
For example, such and such a book or film will be said to redis-
cover the myths and ordeals of the Hero in quest of immortality,
to touch upon the mystery of the redemption of the world, to reveal
the secrets of regeneration through woman or love, and so on.

It is not surprising that critics are increasingly attracted by the
religious implications, and especially by the initiatory symbolism,
of modem literary works. Literature plays an important part in
contemporary civilization. Reading itself, as a distraction and
escape from the historical present, constitutes one of the character-

PATTERNS OF INITIATION IN HIGHER RELIGIONS

135

istic traits of modern man. Hence it is only natural that modem
man should seek to satisfy his suppressed or inadequately satisfied
religious needs by reading certain books that, though apparently
“secular,” in fact contain mythological figures camouflaged as
contemporary characters and offer initiatory scenarios in the guise
of everyday happenings.

The genuineness of this half-conscious or unconscious desire to
share in the ordeals that regenerate and finally save a Hero is
proved, among other things, by the presence of initiatory themes
in the dreams and imaginative activity of modern man. C. G. Jung
has stressed the fact that the process that he terms individuation,
and that, in his view, constitutes the ultimate goal of human life, is
accomplished through a series of ordeals of initiatory type.

As we said before, initiation lies at the core of any genuine
human life. And this is true for two reasons. The first is that any
genuine human life implies profound crises, ordeals, suffering, loss
and reconquest of self, “death and resurrection.” The second is
that, whatever degree of fulfillment it may have brought him, at a
certain moment every man sees his life as a failure. This vision
does not arise from a moral judgment made on his past, but from
an obscure feeling that he has missed his vocation; that he has
betrayed the best that was in him. In such moments of total crisis,
only one hope seems to offer any issue — the hope of beginning
life over again. This means, in short, that the man undergoing such
a crisis dreams of new, regenerated life, fully realized and sig-
nificant. This is something other and far more than the obscure
desire of every human soul to renew itself periodically, as the
cosmos is renewed. The hope and dream of these moments of
total crisis are to obtain a definitive and total renovatio, a renewal
capable of transmuting life. Such a renewal is the result of every
genuine religious conversion.

But genuine and definitive conversions are comparatively rare
in modem societies. To us, this makes it all the more significant
that even nonreligious men sometimes, in the depths of their
being, feel the desire for this kind of spiritual transformation, which,
in other cultures, constitutes the very goal of initiation. It does not
fall to us to determine to what extent traditional initiations fulfilled
their promises. The important fact is that they proclaimed their
intention, and professed to possess the means, of transmuting human
life. The nostalgia for an initiatory renewal which sporadically
arises from the inmost depths of modem nonreligious man hence

136 RUES AND SYMBOLS OF INITIATION

seems to us highly significant. It would appear to represent the
modem formulation of man’s eternal longing to find a positive
meaning in death, to accept death as a transition rite to a higher
mode of being. If we can say that initiation constitutes a specific
dimension of human existence, this is true above all because it is
only in initiation that death is given a positive value. Death pre-
pares the new, purely spiritual birth, access to a mode of being not
subject to the destroying action of Time.

Notes

Foreword

1. Le Chamanisme et les techniques archdiques de Vextase (Paris,
1951); Le Yoga, Immortalite et liberte (Paris, 1955), of which an
English translation. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, will be published
in the fall of 1958 (New York, Bollingen Series No. LVI); and
Forgerons et alchimistes (Paris, 1956).

Introduction

1. Cf. A. van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (Paris, 1909).

Chapter I. Initiation Mysteries in Primitive Religions

1. Cf. A. van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (Paris, 1909) and H.
Webster, Primitive Secret Societies: A Study in Early Politics and
Religion (New York, 1908).

2. “A class cannot initiate its own young men, but both classes co-
operate in this ceremony. On the other hand, in those tribes which
have no longer any class organisation in a vigorous state, it is the local
organisation by its assembled initiated men which conducts the cere-
monies. Such a case is that of the Kurnai and the Chepara tribes.**
A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London,
1904), p. 512.

3. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, p. 139, note 2.

4. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 516 ff.

5. As among many Australian tribes, the pole plays an important
ritual role: it is allowed to fall in the direction in which it has been
decided to perform the ceremony; cf. R. H. Mathews, “The Bora or
Initiation Ceremonies of the Kamilaroi Tribe,” Journal of the Royal

137

138

NOTES

Anthropological Institute, XXIV (1895), 411-427; XXV (1896), 318-
339, especially 327.

6. Ibid., XXIV, 422.

7. Ibid., XXV, 325.

8. Ibid., XXIV, 414 ff.

9. Ibid., XXIV, 418.

10. P. E. Worms, “Djamar, the Creator,” Anthropos, 45 (1950),
650-651 and note 80. This is a type of religious behavior common to
all peoples of archaic culture. In Australia, when the initiate takes part
in religious ceremonies, ”it is realized both by himself and all present
that hd is no longer himself: he is the great ‘dream-time’ hero whose
role he is re-enacting, even if only for a few minutes.” A. P. Elkin,
Aboriginal Men of High Degree (Sidney, 1946), p. 13. Cf. also our
The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York,
1954), pp. 32 ff.

11. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta (London, 1927), I,
188.

12. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 626.

13. Ibid., p. 526. Among the Wotjobaluk, too, the novice is “roasted”
at the fire; cf. ibid., p. 615. Fire plays an important role in the initiation
ceremonies of other Australian tribes; cf. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen,
The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1904), pp. 389 ff.,
and The Arunta, I, 295 ff.; W. L. Warner, A Black Civilisation (New
York, 1937), p. 325; F. Speiser, “Ueber Initiationen in Australien und
Neuguinea,” V erhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in
Basel (1929), pp. 216-18; G. R6heim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream
(New York, 1945), pp. 113 ff. “Ritual roasting” is also documented
in some initiations of medicine men; cf. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 91
(among the Kattang-speaking people), 129 (among the Maitakudi).

14. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 525 ff. As a Cape York informant
expresses it, the novices are “stolen from the mother.” D. F. Thomson,
“Tlie Hero Cult, Initiation and Totemism on Cape York,” Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute, LXIII (1933), 474.

15. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 530.

16. Ibid., pp. 584 ff.

17. R. H. Mathews, “The Burbung of the Wiradjuri Tribes,” Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XXV (1896), 295-318; XXVI
(1897), 272-285, especially I, 307 ff., and II, 272 ff.

18. We may note in passing that Mungan-Ngaua’s disappearance
into the sky is equivalent to his transformation into a remote and in-
active god, a rather frequent phenomenon in the case of the Creator
Gods of primitive religions. Cf. our TraitS d^histoire des religions (Paris,
1949), pp. 53 ff.

19. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 628 ff.

20. This is the opinion of W. Schmidt, Der Ursprung der GottesideCt
in (Munster, 1931), 621-623. This simplicity of initiation, that is, the

NOTES

139

absence of any ritual mutilation (e.g., knocking out the incisor, cir-
cumcision), is also characteristic of some Northern Territory tribes.
See the descriptions of initiation ceremonies among the Melville Island-
ers, the peoples of Port Essington, the Kakadu, and the Larakias in B.
Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory (London, 1914), pp.
91 ff., 1 15 if., 121 if., 153 ff. Speiser is of the opinion that the initiations
documented in the Northern Territory, and especially the Melville
Islanders’ initiation, represent the original and hence the most ancient
form of Australian initiations. (Cf. “Ueber Initiationen,” pp. 59-71,
247; Speiser puts the Kurnai initiation immediately after the Northern
Territory type, ibid., p. 249.) Speiser’s classification is not completely
convincing, for the Northern Territory, and especially Melville Island,
have been subjected to strong Melanesian influences. See below, p. 149
n. 36.

21. The route followed by the procession from the camp to the
mountains represents the path connecting the two circles of the sacred
ground; cf. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 536.

22. Ibid., p. 543.

23. Spencer and Gillen, The Arunta, I, 187. The dramatic and
choreographic recapitulation of the primordial events is a theme com-
mon to all Australian initiations. Cf. also Thomson, “The Hero Cult,”
pp. 488 and passim; R. Piddington, “Karadjeri Initiation,” Oceania, III,
(1932-33), 70 ff.

24. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 557.

25. Ibid., p. 559.

26. Ibid., pp. 527-562.

27. Ibid., pp. 585 ff.

28. R. H. Mathews, “The Burbung of the Wiradjuri Tribes,” Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XXV (1896), 311.

29. Ibid., p. 297.

30. A. L. P. Cameron, “On Some Tribes of New South Wales,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XIX (1885), 344 ff.
357-358; cf. also Howitt, Native Tribes, 588-589. Similar myth and
ritual are found among the Euahlayi; cf. K. L. Parker, The Euahlayi
Tribe (London, 1905), pp. 62-64.

31. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 596.

32. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp.
343, 347, 366.

33. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 502. See other examples in our Le
Chamanisme et les techniques archa’iques de Vextase (Paris, 1951),
pp. 134 ff.

34. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 587-588.

35. Ibid., p. 654.

36. Ibid., p. 674. Cf. the prohibition against drinking during the
daytime imposed on the initiands of Cape York. Thomson “The Hero
Cult,” p. 483.

NOTES

140

37. Among the Yamana, the Halakwulup, and the Selknam, the
initiands are obliged to drink through a bird bone. Cf. J. Haeckel,
“Jugendweihe und M^nerfest auf Feuerland. Ein Beitrag zu ihrer
kulturhistorischen Stellung,” Mitteilungen der Osterreichischen GeselU
schaft fur Anthropologic, Ethnologic und Prdhistorie, LXXIII-LXXVII,
(1947), pp. 91, 114.

38. “Before they reach their destination the young men are forced
to go through high grass and reeds, and made to climb small trees to
test their physical strength and power.” J. Nilles, “The Kuman of the
Chimbu Region, Central Highlands, New Guinea,” Oceania, XXI
(1950), 37.

39. Haeckel, “Jugendweihe”; cf. Schmidt, Ursprung, II (1929),
949.

40. Schmidt, Ursprung, V (1935), 78; VI (1937), 132.

41. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 563. Another ritual prohibition is that
against touching the body with the fingers; the neophyte is obliged to
use a scratching stick; cf. Thomson, “The Hero Cult,” p. 483. The
same custom is found among the Fuegians; cf. Schmidt, Ursprung, VI,
132-133.

42. Piddington, “Karadjeri Initiation,” p. 67.

43. N. B. Tindale, “Initiation among the Pitjandjara Natives of the
Mann and Tomkinson Ranges in South Australia,” Oceania, VI,
(1935), 222-223.

44. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p.
365; Warner, Black Civilisation, pp. 260-285; Piddington, “Karadjeri
Initiation,” p. 67; Roheim, Eternal Ones, p. 13.

45. Cf., for example, Tindale, “Initiation,” p. 220.

46. C. P. Mountford, Brown Men and Red Sand (Melbourne, 1948),

p.33.

47. Spencer and Gillen, The Arunta, I, 175 ff. For the Pitjandjara,
cf. Tindale, “Initiation,” p. 213.

48. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 609. Among the Arunta the novices,
after subincision, embrace the sacred pole (Spencer and Gillen, North-
ern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 342). Now, among some Arunta
clans — ^for example, the Achilpa — ^the sacred pole {kauwa-auwa) is a
symbol of the axis mundi. (Cf. Spencer and Gillen, The Arunta, 1,
378 ff.) On the ritual function and cosmological signification of the
sacred pole of the Achilpa, see E. de Martino, “Angoscia territorial e
riscatto culturale nel mito Achilpa delle origini,” Studi e Materiali di
Storia delle Religioni, XXII (1951-52), 51-66.

49. Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 631.

50. R. H. Mathews, ‘The Burbung,” XXVI (1897), 111.

51. Piddington, “Karadjeri Initiation,” p. 79.

52. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 581-582. A. P. Elkin gives the fol-
lowing details concerning the magic cord of the medicine men of

NOTES

141

southeastern Australia: “This cord becomes a means of performing
marvellous feats, such as sending fire from the medicine-man*s inside,
like an electric wire. But even more interesting is the use made of the
cord to travel up to the sky or to the tops of trees or through space. At
the display at initiation time, in a time of ceremonial excitement, the
doctor lies on his back under a tree, sends his cord up and climbs upon
it to a nest on the top of the tree, then across to other trees, and at
sunset, down to the tree again.” Elkin, Aboriginal Men, p. 64. On the
rites and symbolism of ascension, see below, Chapters IV and V.

53. See some examples in our Le Chamanisme, pp. 125 ff., 134 ff.

Chapter II. The Initiatory Ordeals

1. See the list of tribes which, though they practice circumcision,
know nothing of subincision in F. Speiser, “Ueber Initiationen in
Australien und Neuguinea,” pp. 82-84, and in A. E. Jensen, Beschnei-
dung und Reifezeremonien bei Naturvolkern (Stuttgart, 1933), p. 105,

2. Cf. F. Graebner, “Kulturkreise in Ozeanien,” Zeitschrift fiir
Ethnologie (1905), p. 764; Speiser, “Ueber Initiationen,” p. 197.

3. W. Schmidt, “Die Stellung der Aranda,” Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie
(1908), pp. 866 ff., especially pp. 898-900; F. Speiser, “Ueber die
Beschneidung in der Siidsee,” Acta Tropica (1944),'!, 27. Speiser
believes that circumcision is an Austronesian cultural element, dis-
seminated from Indonesia to Melanesia and Australia.

4. Cf. Jensen, Beschneidung, pp. 21 ff., 73 (Africa), 115-128
(North and South America).

5. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta (London, 1927), I, 202
ff.; cf. also their The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (London,
1904), pp. 334 ff., 342 ff. The bull-roarer represents the mythology
of the supernatural Being Djamar; swinging the bull-roarer makes
Djamar present. Cf. P. E. Worms, “Djamar, the Creator,” Anthropos,
XLV (1950), 657.

6. C. Strehlow, Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stdmme in Zentralaus-
tralien (Frankfurt on the Main, 1920), IV, 24 ff.

7. N. B. Tindale, “Initiation Among the Pitjandjara Natives of the
Mann and Tomkinson Ranges in South Australia,” Oceania, VI ( 1935),
218-219.

8. R. Piddington, “Karadjeri Initiation,” Oceania, III (1932-33),
71 ff.

9. H. Basedow, The Australian Aboriginal (Adelaide, 1925), pp.
241 ff.

10. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p.
501.

IL On bull-roarers in Australia, cf. O. Zerries, Das Schwirrholz.
Untersuchung iiber die Verbreitung und Bedeutung des Schwirrens im
Kult (Stuttgart, 1942), pp. 84-125.

142

NOTES

12. Ibid., pp. 176 ff., 193, etc.; W. Schmidt, Der Ursprung der
Gottesidee, IV (Miinster, 1931), 61, 86, 200.

13. On the dissemination of this motif, see Zerries, Das Schwirrholz,
pp. 188 ff. For the bull-roarer in Thrace and ancient Greece, cf. R.
Pettazzoni, I Misteri (Bologna, 1924), pp. 19-34.

14. We may add that if the bull-roarer is always connected with
initiation, the reverse is not true; initiation does not necessarily imply
the bull-roarer. In Australia there are initiations without bull-roarers.
(Cf. Speiser, “Ueber Initiationen,” p. 156.) It follows that originally
the puberty initiation could be performed without the ritual presence
of bull-roarers (Speiser, “Ueber die Beschneidung,” p. 15; Zerries,
Das Schwirrholz, p. 183). Probably the bull-roarer was brought to
Australia by waves of Melanesian culture; cf. Speiser, “Kulturge-
schichtliche Betrachtungen liber die Initiationen in der Siidsee,” Bulletin
der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft fiir Anthropologic und Ethnologic,
XXII (1945-46), 50 ff. The bull-roarer has different significations in
different primitive religions; among the Aninta and the Loritja, it is
the secret body of the mythical Ancestors; in Africa, the Malay
Peninsula, New Guinea, and elsewhere, the sound of the bull-roarers
represents the voice of the Ancestors (Zerries, Das Schwirrholz, p. 184);
among the Porno, it symbolizes the voice of the dead, who periodically
return to earth at the time of initiations (ibid., p. 186).

15. Hermann Baumann had already suggested this conclusion for
the African hunter culture (cf. Schopfung und Urzeit der Menschen
im Mythos der afrikanischen Volker [Berlin, 1936], pp. 377, 384), and
Otto Zerries has established it for other cultures (Das Schwirrholz, pp.
182 ff).

16. H. Straube, Die Tierverkleidungen der afrikanischen Natur-
volker (Wiesbaden, 1955), pp. 8 ff. and passim. Among some African
tribes the bull-roarer is called lion or leopard (cf. Zerries, Das Schwirr-
holz, p. 178), which illuminates the sequence of mythical Beings in
animal form-bull-roarer-circumcision-mystical death-initiation.

17. Straube, Die Tierverkleidungen, pp. 198 ff.

18. Zerries, Das Schwirrholz, pp. 194, 231.

19. Cf. examples in Jensen, Beschneidung, p. 130.

20. Junod, cited ibid., p. 55.

21. See examples, ibid., pp. 27, 104, etc.

22. J. Winthuis, Das Zweigeschlechterwesen (Leipzig, 1928), pp. 39
ff. and passim.

23. Cf. H. Baumann, Das doppelte Geschlecht. Ethnologische
Studien zur Bisexualitdt in Ritus und Mythos (Berlin, 1955), p. 212.
For other bisexual divine figures in northern Australia, see A. Lommel,
Die Unambal (Hamburg, 1952), pp. 10 ff.

24. Cf. our “La Terre-Mere et les hierogamies cosmiques,” Eranos-
Jahrbuch, XXII (1954), pp. 78 ff.

25. W. E. Roth, Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central

NOTES

143

Queensland Aborigines (Brisbane and London, 1897), p. 180. H.
Klaatsch records similar beliefs among the Niol-Niol, a Northwest
Australian people; cf. Baumann, Das doppelte Geschlecht, p. 214, note
15.

26. R. M. Bemdt, Kunapipi (Melbourne, 1951), p. 16.

27. Cf. M. F. Ashley-Montagu, Coming into Being among the
Australian Aborigines, A Study of the Procreative Beliefs of the Native
Tribes of Australia (New York, 1938), passim; A. P. Elkin, The Aus-
tralian Aborigines (Sydney, 1938), p. 158, note 1, and his review of
Ashley-Montagu’s book in Oceania, VIII (1938), 376-380; Phyllis M.
Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane (Philadelphia, 1939),
p. 43. It should be added that some ethnologists deny that the Austral-
ians aborigines do not know the real cause of conception; cf. W. L.
Warner, A Black Civilisation (New York, 1937), pp. 23-24, 595;
D. F. Thompson, “Fatherhood in the Wik-Monkam Tribe,” American.
Anthropologist, n.s., XXXVIII (1936), 374-393; Geza Roheim, “The
Nescience of the Aranda,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, XVII
(1938), 343-560; R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt, Sexual Behavior
in Western Arnhem Land (New York, 1951), pp. 80 ff. But see also
M. F. Ashley-Montagu, “Nescience, Science, and Psycho-Analysis,”
Psychiatry, IV (1941), pp. 45-60.

28. Baumann, Das doppelte Geschlecht, p. 57; Jensen, Beschnei-
dung, pp. 33 (Africa), 129 ff. (novices dressed as girls and costumes
burned at the conclusion of the initiation).

29. W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. (London, 1831), I, 324;
W. E. Muhlmann, Arioi und Mamaia (Wiesbaden, 1955), pp. 43 ff.,
77.

30. W. Schmidt, “Die geheime Jiinglingsweihe der Karesau-In-
sulaner, Deutsch-Neu-Guinea,” Anthropos, II (1907), 1029-J056.

31. P. Wirz, Die Marind-Anim (Hamburg, 1922 ff.), II, 3, pp. 43
ff; Baumann, Das doppelte Geschlecht, p. 228.

32. A. C. Haddon, “The Secular and Ceremonial Dances of Torres
Straits,” International Archiv fiir Ethnologie, VI (1893), 131 ff.,
140 ff.

33. A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (Lon-
don, 1904), pp. 658 ff. The ceremony is fairly widespread in Australia;
cf. Piddington, “Karadjeri Initiation,” p. 71; C. P. Mountford, Brown
Men and Red Sand (Melbourne, 1948), p. 32; G. R6heim, The Eternal
Ones of the Dream (New York, 1945), p. 218, etc.; Berndt, Kunapipi,
p. 36 (opening a vein in the arm is equivalent to reopening the urethral
incision).

34. Piddington, “Karadjeri Initiation,” p. 72; Howitt, Native Tribes,
p. 676 (Itchumundi); Warner, A Black Civilisation, pp. 274 ff.; D.
Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines (New York, 1939), pp. 41 ff.;
144 ff.; R6heim, The Eternal Ones, pp. 227 ff., 230 ff.

144

NOTES

35. Margaret Mead, “The Mountain Arapesh,” American Museum
of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, II (1940), 348 ff.

36. Albert Anfinger, “Einige ethnographische Notizen zur Beschnei-
dung in Neuguinea,” Ethnos, VI (1941), 37 ff. The same custom is
followed in Wogeo, one of the Schouten Islands in the territory of New
Guinea: “Women are automatically cleaned by the process of men-
struation, but men, in order to guard against disease, have periodically
to incise the penis and allow a quantity of blood to flow. This operation
is often referred to as men’s menstruation.” I. Hogbin, Oceania, V
(1935), 330; cited by Ashley-Montagu, Coming into Being, p. 303.

37. Alphons Schafer, “Zur Initiation im Wagi-Tal,” Anthropos,
XXXIII (1938), 421 ff.

38. J. Nilles, ‘The Kuman of the Chimbu Region, Central High-
lands, New Guinea,” Oceania, XXI (1950), 37.

39. Ashley-Montagu, Coming into Being, pp. 302 ff.

40. Cf., for example, Tindale, “Initiation among the Pitjandara,”
p. 208; Roheim, The Eternal Ones, pp. 229 ff. See also B. Bettelheim,
Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (Glencoe, 111.,
1954), pp. 173 ff. On the cultural chronology of Australia, cf. D. S.
Davidson, The Chronological Aspects of Certain Australian Social
Institutions (Philadelphia, 1928), “Archaeological Problems in North-
ern Australia,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, LXV
(1934), 145-184, and “North-Western Australia and the Question of
Influences from the East Indies,” Journal of the American Oriental
Society, LVIII (1938), 61-80; F. D. McCarthy, “The Prehistoric Cul-
tures of Australia,” Oceania XIX (1949), 305-319; and “The Oceanic
and Indonesian Affiliations of Australian Aboriginal Cultures,” Journal
of the Polynesian Society, LXII (1953), 243-261.

41. Cf. Speiser, “Ueber Initiationen,” especially pp. 219-223, 247 ff.;
Baumann, Das doppelte Geschlecht, pp. 216 ff.

42. Cf. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 592, 603, 657, etc.; R. H.
Mathews, “The Burbung of the Wiradjuri Tribes,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, XXV (1896), 310; Schmidt, Ursprung, III,
1062-1080 (tribes of southeastern Australia) ; H. Webster, Primitive
Secret Societies: A Study in Early Politics and Religion (New York,
1908), pp. 40-41 (Australia, Melanesia); Jensen, Beschneidung, pp.
26, 39, 100 ff. (Africa, Melanesia).

43. Schmidt, Ursprung, VI, 458 ff. But is should be added that,
according to Gusinde, the revelations concerning the Supreme Being
are not made directly but by allusion, and that in the Yamana initiations
the principal role is played by the Earth Spirit (Erdgeist) Yetaita; cf.
M. Gusinde, Die Yamana (Modling, 1937), pp. 940 ff. Cf. also p. 29 ff.

44. R. Lowie, in his review of Gusinde’s book, holds that the
Yamana puberty ceremony was originally only for boys. Cf. American
Anthropologist (1938), pp. 499 ff.

NOTES

145

45. W. Koppers, Primitive Man and his World Picture (London,
1952), p. 140. In addition to this popular account of Fuegian initia-
tions, the reader can profitably consult Gusinde’s monographs Die
Selknam (Modling, 1951), and Die Yamana (Vienna, 1937); Vol. I of
the Handbook of South American Indians, Bulletin 143, Bureau of
American Ethnology (Washington, 1945); and J. Haeckel’s article,
“Jugendweihe und Mannerfest auf Feuerland. Ein Beitrag zu ihrer
kulturhistorischen Stellung” {Mitteilungen der Oesterreichischen Ge-
sellschaft fur Anthropologic, Ethnologic und Prdhistorie, LXIII-
LXXVII (1947), 84-114.

46. Koppers, Primitive Man, pp. 140 ff.

47. Gusinde, Die Yamana, pp. 942 ff.; Haekel, “Jugendweihe,” p.
89.

48. Haekel, “Jugendweihe,” p. 100.

49. Similar secret male festivals also exist among the Yamana
and the Selknam; cf. ibid., p. 94.

50. The same ceremony is found among the Yamana. Similar myths
are documented among other South American tribes; see A. M6traux,
“A Myth of the Chamacoco Indians and its Social Significance,” Jour-
nal of American Folklore, LVI (1943), 113-119. Cf. the historico-
cultural analysis of this mythico-ritual complex of the “terrorization
of women,” in Haekel, “Jugendweihe,” pp. 106 ff.

51. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, p. 24.

52. G. Landtman, The Kiwai-Papuans of British New-Guinea (Lon-
don, 1927), p. 96.

53. H. Ward, cited in Jensen, Beschneidung, p. 31; A. Bastian, Die
deutsche Expedition an der Loango-kuste (Jena, 1875), II, 18.

54. Jensen, Beschneidung, p. 39.

55. L. Frobenius, Masken und Geheimbunde Afrikas (Halle, 1898),
p. 145.

56. K. Weule, cited in Jensen, Beschneidung, 51.

57. O. D. Tauem, Patasiva und Patalima (Leipzig, 1918), pp. 145
ff.; Jensen, Beschneidung, p. 78.

58. G. Tessmann, Die Pangwe (Berlin, 1913), II, 39-94; summary
in Jensen, Beschneidung, pp. 33-35.

59. E. Torday and T. A. Joyce, Les Bushongo (Brussels, 1910), pp.
82 ff. A month later the third and last Dina (ordeal) takes place, con-
sisting in climbing a tree. Ibid., pp. 84-85.

60. The Men’s House is a characteristic feature of the Melanesian
cultural complex, but the institution is found elsewhere in the world
and always in connection with puberty rites. Cf. Webster, Primitive
Secret Societies, Chapter I, “The Men’s House,” pp. 1-19; H. Schurtz,
Altersklassen und Mdnnerbunde (Berlin, 1902), pp. 202-317. See
also E. Schlesier, Die Erscheinungsformen des Mdnnerhauses und des
Klubwesen in Mikronesien (The Hague, 1953).

61. J. Holmes, “Initiation Ceremonies of Natives of the Papuan

146 NOTES

Gulf,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XXXIl (1902),
418-425.

62. A. Riesenfeld, The Megalithic Culture of Melanesia (Leiden,
1950), p. 591; cf. pp. 593 ff. for an analysis of the megalithic elements
in the Nanga ceremony.

63. L. Fison, “The Nanga, or Sacred Stone Enclosure of Wainimaia,
Fiji,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XIV (1885),
22; see especially pp. 19-26. A. B. Joske, “The Nanga of Viti Levu,”
International Archiv fur Ethnologic, II (1889), 254-271, gives a
similar description, with some variants (e.g., pp. 264-265, one of the
instructors shouts to the novices that they are responsible for the death
of the men lying in the enclosure). Cf. also B. Thomson, The Fijians
(London, 1908), pp. 148-157.

64. Cf. A. Slawik, “Kultische Geheimbtinde der Japaner und Ger-
manen,” Wiener Beitrdge zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik, IV
(1936), 675-764, 739 ff.

65. Jensen, Beschneidung, p. 53.

66. See some African examples, ibid,, p. 29.

67. Ibid,, p. 36.

68. Ibid,, p. 94.

69. For example, at Ceram; Zerries, Das Schwirrholz, p. 44. On this
motif, see our “Myst^re et regeneration spirituelle,” Eranos-Jahrbuch,
XXIII (1955), 89, note 41.

70. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, p. 103.

71. A. R. Radcliff e-Brown, “The Rainbow-Serpent Myth in South-
East Australia,” Oceania, I (1930), 344.

72. Schurtz, Altersklassen, p. 224.

73. H. Nevermann, Masken und Geheimbiinde Melanesien (Leipzig,
1933), pp. 24, 40, 56.

74. Jensen, Beschneidung, p. 83.

75. Ibid,, pp. 87 (the Kai), 89 (the Jabim). Among the Karesau,
the candidates are isolated in two cabins, and they are said to be in
the spirit’s belly; cf. Schmidt, “Die geheime Jiinglingsweihe,” pp. 1032

ff.

76. F. E. Williams, ‘The Pairama Ceremony in the Purari Delta,
Papua,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, LIII (1923),
363 ff.; Speiser, “Ueber Initiationen,” pp. 120 ff.; Nevermann, Masken,
pp. 51 ff.

77. R. Thumwald, “Primitive Initiations- und Wiedergeburtsriten,”
Eranos-Jahrbuch, VII (1940), 393.

78. On this cosmological symbolism in initiation ceremonies, see
Chapter III.

79. Cf. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, p. 42, note 2.

80. Cannibals, too, do not use their fingers (cf., e.g., Jensen, Besch-
neidung, p. 143), because they consider themselves to be ghosts.

NOTES

147

81. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

82. E.g., the island of Mailu; cf. ibid., 92.

83. Ibid. This use of a little stick during the initiation period is a
custom documented in more archaic cultures than those just mentioned;
it exists among the Fuegians and the Californians; cf. Schmidt, C/r-
sprung, VI, 132 ff.

84. In the Congo, initiates are called nganga, “the knowing ones,”
and noninitiates vanga, “the unenlightened.” Webster, Primitive Secret
Societies, p. 175.

85. Cf., for example, Spencer and Gillen, The Arunta, I, 178 ff.; A.
Lommel, “Notes on the Sexual Behaviour and Initiation, Wunambal
Tribe, North Western Australia,” Oceania, XX (1949-50), 159; Mount-
ford, Brown Men, pp. 33-34. Among the Euahlayi, the young man is
initiated into the mystery of Gayandi, and the bull-roarer is revealed
to him, only after he has taken part in five Boorahs; cf. K. L. Parker,
The Euahlayi Tribe (London, 1905), p. 81.

86. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 662 ff.

87. Tindale, “Initiation among the Pitjandara,” p. 223.

Chapter III. From Tribal Rites to Secret CXjlts

1. B. Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia
(London, 1914), p. 326; B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta
(London, 1927), II, 481; W. E. Roth, Ethnological Studies among the
North-WesUCentral Queensland Aborigines (Brisbane and London,
1897), p. 184; K. L. Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe (London, 1905), pp.
56-57; W. L. Warner, A Black Civilisation (New York, 1937), pp.
15-76. Cf. also W. Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (Munster,
1931), III, 706-709 (Kulin), 988-990 (Euahlayi).

2. For example, among the tribes of southern South America; cf.
J. Haeckel, “Jungendweihe und Mannerfest auf Feuerland. Ein Beitrag
zu ihrer kulturhistorischen Stellung,” Mitteilungen der Oesterreichische
Gesellschaft fiir Anthropologie, Ethnologic und Prdhistorie, LXIII-
LXXVII (1947), 132 ff.

3. Cf. Frazer, Balder the Beautiful (London, 1913), I, 22-100; E. S.
Hartland, Primitive Paternity (London, 1910), I, 91-98; W. E. Peuc-
kert, Geheimkulte (Heidelberg, 1951), pp. 256-257.

4. Cf. Frazer, Balder, pp. 56, 59-61, 66.

5. Cf. H. Ploss and M. Bartels, Das Weib in der Natur- und Volker-
kunde (Leipzig, 1908), I, 454-502; W. Schmidt and W. Koppers,
Volker und Kulturen (Regensburg, 1924), I, 273-275 (diffusion of
the custom).

6. R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt, The First Australians (New
York, 1954), p. 54.

7. R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt, Sexual Behaviour in Western
Arnhem Land (New York, 1951), pp. 89-91.

NOTES

148

8. See the list of peoples in Peuckert, Geheimkulte^ p. 258.

9. Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, I, 464 ff.

10. £. Gaspaiini, Nozze, societd e abitazione degli antichi Slavi
(Venice, 1954), Appendix I and II, p. 14.

11. Cf. our “Mystere et r6g6n6ration spirituelle,” Eranos-Jahrbuch,
XXIII (1955), 79.

12. W. Schmidt, Das Mutterrecht (Vienna, 1955), p. 131.

13. Cf. our Traite d*histoire des religions (Paris, 1949), p. 270.

14. Frazer, Balder, I, 76 ff.

15. Schmidt, Das Mutterrecht, p. 132.

16. H. Ling-Roth, “The Native of Borneo,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, XXIII (1893), 41 ff.; H. Baumann, Das
doppelte Geschlecht, Ethnologische Studien zur Bisexualitdt in Ritus
und Mythos (Berlin, 1955), p. 62.

17. Baumann, Das doppelte Geschlecht, pp. 62-63.

18. R. P. Heckel, “Miscellanea,” Anthropos, XXX (1935), 875;
Gasparini, Nozze, p. 27. Graded stages of initiation are also found
among the tribes of northwestern Australia: “With sexual maturity the
girl may take part in the women’s secret corroborees. After she has a
child, she may assist at the rites carried out for her female relatives.
Later she gradually learns the songs that are daragu (=sacred) and
gunbu (= taboo) to the men, and in old age, she directs proceedings
and becomes responsible for the handing on of her knowledge to the
generation of women below her.” Phyllis M. Kaberry, Aboriginal
Woman, Sacred and Profane, (Philadelphia, 1939), p. 237.

19. Our “Mystere et regeneration,” p. 81, after R. Wolfram, “Wei-
berbiinde,” Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde, XLII (1933), 143 ff. Child-
birth already constitutes a mystery among some Australian tribes.
Phyllis Kaberry had more difficulty in collecting secret childbirth
songs than she had in obtaining information from men in regard to
the initiation of boys; cf. Aboriginal Woman, pp. 241 ff.

20. Our “Mystere et regeneration,” p. 82; R. Wolfram, “Weiber-
bunde,” p. 144.

21. Our Images et symboles (Paris, 1952), pp. 120 ff.; cf. also
R, Wolfram, Schwerttanz und Mdnnerbund (Cassel, 1935 ff), p. 172.

22. R. Heine-Geldem, “Sudostasiens,” in G. Buschan, Illustrierte
Volkerkunde (Stuttgart, 1923), II, 841; Gasparini, Nozze, pp. 18 ff.

23. Cf. A. Slawik, “Kultische Geheimbiinde der Japaner und Ger-
manen,” Wiener Beitrdge zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik, IV
(1936), 737 ff.; Peuckert, Geheimkulte, p. 253.

24. D. Zelenin, Russische (ostslawische) Volkskunde (Berlin, 1927),
pp. 337 ff.; Gasparini, Nozze, pp. 22-33; our **Myst^re et rSgenSration,**
pp. 80 ff.

25. T. Volkov, “Rites et usages nuptiaux en Ucraine,” UAnthro-
pologie (1891, 1892), summarized in Gasparini, Nozze, pp. 42 ff.

NOTES

149

26. R. M. Berndt, Kunapipi (Melbourne, 1951), p. 34.

27. The mystical foundresses of the ceremony, the Wauwalak
Sisters, are “as much alive spiritually today as ever they were.” Berndt,
Kunapipi, p. 33.

28. The theme of the myth follows a well-known pattern: (1) a
Supernatural Being kills men (to initiate them); (2) (not understand-
ing the meaning of this initiatory death) men avenge themselves by
slaying him; (3) but afterward they institute secret ceremonies related
to this primordial drama; (4) the Supernatural Being is made present
at these ceremonies through an image or a sacred object supposed to
represent his body or his voice.

29. Ibid., p. 36.

30. Ibid., p. 37.

31. Ibid., p. 41.

32. Ibid., p. 38. The elder Sister was smeared with afterbirth blood;
the younger Sister’s efforts in dancing before the Serpent had brought
on her menstrual flow {ibid., p. 23).

33. Ibid., p. 14. The cabin in which the two Sisters took refuge —
and which plays a part in the two other rituals dependent on this
myth, djunggawon and njurlmack — ^likewise represents the Mother’s
womb.

34. Ibid., p. 45.

35. Ibid., p. 53.

36. A. P. Elkin, Preface to Berndt’s book, ibid., p. xxii; W. Schmidt,
“Mythologie und Religion in Nord Australien,” Anthropos, XLVIII
(1953), 898-924.

37. “Then we had nothing: no sacred objects, no sacred ceremonies,
the women had everything.” Berndt, Kunapipi, p. 8, cf. pp. 55, 58,

59. As we have seen, similar traditions are documented among the
Selknam and among some tribes of the Amazon basin; cf. Chapter 11,
note 50 (p. 145), and M6traux’s article cited therein, especially
pp. 117-118.

38. Cf., for example, Berndt, Kunapipi, pp. 24 ff.

39. Cf. H. Lommel, in C. Hentze, Tod, Auferstehung, Weltordnung
(Zurich, 1955), p. 128. For the ceremony as it is performed today,
see Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born (Oxford,
1920), pp. 27 ff.

40. For an analysis of this motif in Buddhist philosophy, cf. our
Images et symboles, pp. 100 ff.

41. R. Thumwald, “Primitive Initiations- und Wiedergeburtstriten,”
Eranos-Jahrbuch, VII (1940), 390, citing G. Wagner, “Reifeweihen
bei den Bantu-Stammen Kavirondos und ihre heutige Bedeutung,”
Archiv fur Anthropologie, n.s., XXV (1939), 85-100.

42. On the diksha, see the texts collected by S. L6vi, La Doctrine
du sacrifice dans les Brahmanas (Paris, 1898), pp. 103 ff. Cf. also our

150

NOTES

Le Yoga. Immortalite et liberte (Paris, 1954), pp. 118, 374; H.
Lommel, in Hentze, Tod, pp. 115 ff.

43. In Hentze, Tod, p. 127.

44. Cf. our “Kosmogonische mythen und magische Heilung,”
Paideuma, VI (1956), 194-204.

45. Cf. Shatapatha Brahmana, III, 2, 1, 18 ff. In the Maitrayani-
Samhita (III, 6, 8), the union is between Yajha and Dakshina. Cf.
also Lommel, in Hentze, Tod, pp. 114 ff.

46. M. Canney, “The Skin of Rebirth,” Man, XCI (July, 1939),
104-105; W. S. Routledge and K. Routledge, With a Prehistoric People
(London, 1910), pp. 151-153. Cf. also our “Mystere ct regeneration,
pp. 66-67.

47. Cf. T. Zachariae, “Scheingeburt,” Zeitschrift der Vereins fur
Volkskunde, XX (1910), 141 ff.; also in his Kleine Schriften (Bonn
and Leipzig, 1920), pp. 266 ff. W. Crooke, Things Indian, Being Dis-
cursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India (London,
1906), pp. 500 ff.; Sir J. G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London,
1910), I, 32; IV, 208 ff.; Lommel, in Hentze, Tod, pp. 121 ff., and
H. Hoffmann, ibid., pp. 139 ff.

48. Cf. Hentze, Tod, pp. 148 and passim.

49. Ibid., p. 145; P. Wirz, Totenkult auf Bali (Stuttgart, 1928),
Fig. 27.

50. See some references in R. Briffault, The Mothers (London,
1927), I, 471 ff. For south India, cf. H. Whitehead, The Village Gods
of South India, 2nd ed. (Madras, 1921), pp. 37 ff., 55, 64, 98, etc.;
G. Oppert, On the Original Inhabitants of Bharatavarsa or India
(Westminster, 1893), pp. 24, 274 ff., 461 ff.; our Le Yoga, pp. 346 ff.

51. The legend is already attested in the Rig-Veda (VII, 33, 13) and
became widely disseminated; for the other Vedic sources, cf. L. Sieg,
Sagenstoffe des Rigveda (Stuttgart, 1902), pp. 105 ff. For the south
Indian variants, see Oppert, Original Inhabitants, pp. 67 ff. Cf. also
P. Thieme, “Ueber einige Benennungen des Nachkommen,” Zeitschrift
fiir Vergleichende Sprachforschung, LX VI (1939), 141 ff. (“Topf als
Name des Bastards”).

52. G. van der Leeuw, “Das sogenannte Hockerbegrabnis und der
agyptische Tjknu/* Studi e Materiali di Storia delle religioni, XIV
(1938), 150-167; Hentze, Tod, pp. 150 ff.

53. H. Maspero, “Les procedes de ‘nourrir le Principe vital’ dans
la religion taoYste, Journal Asiatique (1937), p. 198. On “embryonic
respiration” in Taoism, cf. our Le Yoga, pp. 71 ff. 395 ff.

54. Liu Hua-yang, Huei-ming-king, cited in R. Stein, “Jardins en
miniature d’ExtrSme-Orient,” Bulletin de VEcole Frangaise d*Extrime
Orient, XLII (1943), 97.

55. On this motif, cf. our Forgerons et alchimistes (Paris, 1956),
p. 159.

NOTES

151

56. Ibid,, p. 160.

57. Stein, “Jafdins en miniature,” p. 44.

58. Cf. our **Kosmogonische Mythen,” passim.

Chapter IV. Individual Initiations and Secret Societies

1. Cf. our “Myst^re et r6gen6ration spirituelle,” Eranos-Jahrbuch,
XXIII (1955), p. 90, after W. D. Westervelt, Legends of Ma-ui the
Demi-god (Honolulu, 1910), pp. 128 ff.; J. F. Stimson, The Legends
of Maui and Tahaki (Honolulu, 1937), pp. 46 ff.

2. J. Layard, Stone Men of Malekula (London, 1942), pp. 225 ff.,
649 ff.; and “The Making of Man in Malekula,” Eranos-Jahrbuch,
XVI (1949).

3. A. B. Deacon, “Geometrical Drawings from Malekula and
Other Islands of the New Hebrides,” Journal of the Royal Anthro-
pological Institute, LXVI (1934), 132 ff., and Malekula: A Vanishing
People of the New Hebrides (London, 1934), especially pp. 552 ff.;
J. Layard, “Totenfahrt auf Malekula,” {Eranos-Jahrbuch, IV [1937],
242-291), and Stone Men of Malekula, pp. 340 ff., 649 ff. Cf. also
W. F. Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates: A Reference of the Sixth
Aeneid to Initiation Pattern (Oxford, 1936), p. 19.

4. Layard, Stone Men of Malekula, pp. 730, 221.

5. Layard, “The Making of Man in Malekula,” p. 228 and PI. II.

6. C. Hentze, Tod, Auferstehung, Weltordnung (Zurich, 1955),
pp. 79 ff., 90 ff. Cf. also W. Krickeberg, “Ostasien-Amerika,” Sino-
logica, II (1950), 195-233, especially 228 ff.

7. Cf. our “Myst^re et regeneration,” pp. 90 ff., citing M. Haavio,
Vdindmoinen, Eternal Sage (FF Communications, No. 144 [Helsinki,
1952]), pp. 117 ff.

8. Haavio, Vdindmoinen, pp. 114 ff.

9. Our “Mystere et regeneration,” p. 92; cf. L. Rademacher, “Wal-
fischmythen,” Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft, IX (1906), 246 ff.;
F. Graebner, Das Weltbild der Primitiven (Munich, 1924), pp. 62 ff.

10. Haavio, Vdindmoinen, pp. 106 ff.; our “Mystere et regenera-
tion,” p. 95

11. Haavio, Vdindmoinen, p. 124.

12. On the motif of the “clashing rocks,” see A. B. Cook, Zeus
(Cambridge, 1940), III, 2, pp. 975-1016 (Appendix P: “Floating
Islands”) ; K. von Spiess, “Der Schuss nach dem Vogel,” Jahrbuch fur
Historische Volkskunde, V-VI (1937), 204-235, and “Die Hasenjagd,”
ibid., pp. 243-267. The expression “two razor-edged restless mountains”
is attested in the Suparnadhyaya (25, 5; reading, with Coomaraswamy,
parvatah asthirah); cf. A. K. Coomaraswamy, “Symplegades,” Studies
and Ess€tys in the History of Science and Learning Offered in Homage
to George Sarton (New York, 1947), p. 470, note 11.

13. On the theme of the “active door” in Celtic mythology, cf. A. C.

NOTES

152

Brown, Iwain (Boston, 1903), pp. 80 ff. On the “revolving barrier,”
cf. ibid., and G. L. Kittredge, A Study of Sir Gawain and the Green
jRT/iig/i/ (Cambridge, Mass., 1916), pp. 244 ff. Cf. also Coomaraswamy,
“Symplegades,” pp. 479 ff.

14. Some South American tribes picture the door of Heaven or of
the (subterranean) Other World as a jaguar’s jaws; cf. Krickeberg,
“Ostasien-Amerika,” p. 201. The architectural motif of the door in
the form of a monster’s jaws is quite widespread in Central America;
ibid., p. 232, and C. Hentze’s studies, especially Objets rituels, croyances
et dieux de la Chine antique et de VAmMque (Anvers, 1936), Die
Sakralbronzen und ihre Bedeutung in den fruhchinesischen Kulturen
(Anvers, 1941), and Bronzegerdt, Kultbauten, Religion im dltesten
China der Shangzeit (Anvers, 1951). Cf. also his Tod, p. 90 and Figs.
76, 77, 106, on the Symplegades in the form of a vagina dentata in
South American ceramics. On the Symplegades in South American
mythology and folklore, cf. Coomaraswamy, “Symplegades,” p. 475.

15. Coomaraswamy, “Symplegades,” p. 470. On this motif, see also
Coomaraswamy, “Svayamatrnna: Janua Coeli,” Zalmoxis, II (1939),
3-51.

16. Coomaraswamy, “Symplegades,” p. 486. Cf. Also our Le
Chamanisme et les techniques archdiques de Vextase (Paris, 1951),
pp. 419 ff.

17. Cf. Coomaraswamy, “Symplegades,” p. 475.

18. The bibliography is too extensive to be given here. The docu-
mentation down to ca. 1908 is utilized by Sir J. G. Frazer, Totemism
and Exogamy (London, 1910), III, 370-456. For a general study,
see J. Haeckel, “Schutzgeistsuche und Jugendweihe im westlichen
Nordamerika,” Ethnos, XII (1947), 106-122.

19. Among the numerous works by Franz Boas which are funda-
mental for our investigation are “The Social Organization and the
Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Annual Report of the Smith-
sonian Institution, 1894-95 (Washington 1897), pp. 311-738; “Eth-
nology of the Kwakiutl,” 35th Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology, 1913-1914 (Washington, 1921), pp. 43-1481;
The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians, Columbia University Contribu-
tions to Anthropology, X (2 vols.. New York, 1930). Cf. also P.
Drucker, “Kwakiutl Dancing Societies,” Anthropological Records,
University of California Publications, II (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1940), 201-230; J. Haeckel, “Initiationen und Geheimbiinde an der
Nordwestkiiste Nordamerikas,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologische
Gesellschaft in Wien, LXXXIII (1954), 176-190; W. Muller, Weltbild
und Kult der Kwakiutl-Indianer (Wiesbaden, 1955).

20. “It is clear that with the change of name the whole social struc-
ture, which is based on the names, must break down. Instead of being
grouped in clans, the Indians are now grouped according to the spirits
which have initiated them.” Boas, “Secret Societies,” p. 418.

NOTES 153

21. Drucker, “Kwakiutl Dancing Societies,” p. 210, note 24; MUller,
Weltbild und Kult, p. 72.

22. Boas, “Secret Societies,” pp. 440 ff.; Muller, Weltbild und Kult,
72.

23. Boas, “Secret Societies,” p. 457. On the cosmological symbolism
of the ceremonial house, cf. Muller, Weltbild und Kult, pp. 17 ff.

24. MUller, Welbild und Kult, p. 20.

25. Haeckel, “Initiationen und GeheimbUnde,” p. 170.

26. Cf. Boas, “Secret Societies,” PI. 29; Haeckel, “Initiationen
und GeheimbUnde,” p. 169.

27. Haeckel, “Initiationen und GeheimbUnde,” p. 189.

28. Boas, “Secret Societies,” pp. 441-443, 524 ff.; and “Ethnology
of the Kwakiutl,” pp. 1172 ff. The Bella Coolas also have a Cannibal
Society; initiation into it resembles that of the Kwakiutl; cf. Boas,
“Secret Societies,” pp. 649-650; and “The Mythology of Bella Coola
Indians,” Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, I, 2
(1900), 118-120. For the initiation rituals of other secret societies
among the Indians of northwestern America, cf. Frazer, Totemism
and Exogamy, HI, 449-512, 527-550; and Haeckel, “Initiationen und
GeheimbUnde,”* passim.

29. General studies are H. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Mdnnerbunde
(Berlin, 1902), pp. 318-437; H. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies:
A Study in Early Politics and Religion (New York, 1908), pp. 74-190;
Semaine d^ethnologie religieuse. Compte-rendu analytique de la 111*
session (Enghien and Moedling, 1923), pp. 329-456, Cf. also W. E.
Peuckert, Geheimkulte (Heidelberg, 1951).

30. L. Frobenius, “Die Masken und GeheimbUnde Afrikas,”
Abhandlungen d. Kaiserl. Leopold-Carolin. Deutsch. Akademie d.
Naturforscher, LXXIV (1899), 1-266; cf. Semaine d* ethnologic relig-
ieuse, pp. 335 ff.; W. Schmidt, Das Mutterrecht (Vienna, 1955), pp.
171 ff.

31. E. M. Loeb, “Tribal Initiation and Secret Societies,” University
of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology ^
XXV, 3 (Berkeley, 1929), 262.

32. A. E. Jensen, Beschneidung und Reifezeremonien bei Natur
volkern (Stuttgart, 1933), p. 79.

33. Cf. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, p. 176, note 2; F
Speiser, “Ueber Initiationen in Australien und Neuguinea,” Verhand-
lungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Basel (1929), pp. 256 ff.
Jensen, Beschneidung, p. 99; A. van Gennep, Les Rites de passage
(Paris, 1909), pp. 126 ff.

34. Melanesia: H. Codrington, The Melanesians (Oxford, 1891)
pp. 69-115; R. Parkinsons, Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee (Stuttgart
1907), pp. 565-680; W. H. R. Rivers, The History of Melanesia
Society (Cambridge, 1914), II, 205-233, 592-593; H. Nevermann
Masken und GeheimbUnde Melanesiens (Berlin and Leipzig, 1933)

154

NOTES

H. Kroll, ‘*Der Iniet. Das Wesen eines melanesischen Geheimbundes,”
Zeitsehrift fur Ethnologic, LXX (1937), 180-220. Africa: Frobenius,
*‘Masken und Geheimbiinde Afrikas*’; E. Johanssen, Mysterien eines
Bantu-Volkes (Leipzig, 1925); £. Hildebrandt, Die Geheimbiinde
Westafrikas (Leipzig, 1937); G. W. Harley, Notes on the Poro in
Liberia, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology
and Ethnology, XIX, 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1941); K. L. Little, “The
Poro Society as an Arbiter of Culture,” African Studies, VII (1948),
1-15.

35. Cf. E. Andersson, Contribution d Vethnographie des Kuta
(Uppsala, 1953), I, 210 ff.; our “Mystere et r6g6n6ration,” p. 71.

36. Cf. our Le Chamanisme et les techniques archdiques de Vextase
(Paris, 1951), pp. 47 ff., 55 ff., 65 ff.

37. Andersson, Ethnographic des Kuta, p. 213.

38. Ibid., p. 214.

39. Ibid., pp. 264 ff.

40. Ibid., p. 266, note 1.

41. L. Bittremieux, La SociitS secrete des Bakhimba au Mayombe
(Brussels, 1936). Cf. our “Mystere et Regen6ration,” pp. 72 ff.

42. Bittremieux, SociSte secrdte, p. 47.

43. Ibid., p. 50.

44. Ibid., p. 51.

45. Ibid., p. 52.

46. See, for example, the initiation into the nkita society of the
lower Congo, which includes, among other things, a long seclusion in
the bush, during which the “dead man’s” body is believed to decom-
pose to the state of a skeleton; it is from his bones that the novice
is mystically resuscitated, as was the society’s divine patron, the
Great Fetish. Cf. A. Bastian, Die deutsche Expedition an der Loango
Kiiste (Jena, 1875), II, 17 ff.; J. H. Weeks, Among the Primitive
Bakongo (London, 1914), pp. 158 ff.; Frobenius, “Masken und
Geheimbiinde,” pp. 51 ff. On the theme of mystical death represented
as reduction to a skeleton, see Chapter V, p. 92 ff. On the myths
and initiation rites of the Bantu Ryangombe mystery, cf. Johanssen,
Mysterien eines Bantu-Volkes, pp. 13 ff., 29 ff., and passim; A. Fried-
rich, Afrikanische Priestertumer (Stuttgart, 1939), pp. 62 ff., 367 ff.

47. Cf. G. Catlin, O-Kee-Pa (London, 1867), pp. 13 ff., 28 ff.; and
Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1885 (Washington,
1886), Part 2, pp. 309 ff. A summary of the ceremony is given in
Jensen, Beschneidung, pp. 122-123. dually cruel are the initiation
rites of the hawinalal, the war dance of &e Kwakiutl; cf. Boas, “Secret
Societies,” pp. 496 ff.

48. Chamacoco and Vilela: A. M6traux, “A Myth of the Chamacoco
Indians and Its Social Significance,” Journal of American Folklore,
LVI (1943), pp. 114, 117. Mandan: A W. Bowers, Mandan Social

NOTES

155

and Ceremonial Organization (Chicago, 1950), pp. 115 ff. Kwakiutl:
Boas, “Secret Societies,” p. 446; Drucker, “Kwakiutl Dancing So-
cieties, ” pp. 208 ff. Porno: E. Loeb, “Porno Folkways,” University
of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology,
XDC (Berkeley, 1926), 372-374; and ‘The Eastern Kuksu Cult,” ibid.,
XXXIII (1933), pp. 172 ff., 181.

49. Ge and Tupi: J. Haekel, “Zur Problem des heiligen Pfahles
bei den Indianers Brasiliens,” Ahais do XXXI Congr. Internacional
de Americanistas (Sao Paulo, 1955), pp. 230 ff.; “Plains Indians,”
ibid., pp. 235 ff.; and “Zum ethnologischen Aussagenwert von Kultur-
parallelen,” Wiener V olkerkundliche Mitteilungen, III, 2 (1955),
passim.

50. Yaruro: V. Petrullo, ‘The Yaruros of the Capanaparo River,
Venezuela,” Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 123 (Washing-
ton, 1939), pp. 249 ff. Araucanian: our Le Chamanisme, pp. 122 ff.,
293 ff.; J. Cooper, “The Araucanians,” Handbook of South American
Indians (Washington, 1946), II, 742 ff. Maidu: Haekel, “Zur Problem
des heiligen Pfahles,” p. 238.

51. Haekel, “Zur Problem des heiligen Pfahles,” pp. 239-240.

52. Cf. our Le Chamanisme, pp. 299 ff., especially p. 301, note 1
(Bibliography) .

53. Cf. G. Tessmann, Die Pangwe (Berlin, 1913), II, 39.

54. Andersson, Ethnographie des Kuta, pp. 219-221.

55. U. Harva, Die Religidsen V orstellungen der Mordwinen (Hel-
sinki, 1952), pp. 386 ff.

56. Andersson, Ethnographie des Kuta, p. 218.

57. Harva, Mordwinen, p. 387.

58. On women’s secret ceremonies, cf. R. Wolfram, “Weiberbiinde,”
Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde, XLII (1933), pp. 143 ff.; O. Loorits,
“Das sogenannte Weiberfest bei den Russen und Setukesen,” Comm.
Archivii traditionum popularium Estoniae, XIV (1940), and Die
Grundzuge des estnischen Volksglauben (Lund, 1949 ff.), II, 394 ff.;
Peuckert, Geheimkulte, pp. 230 ff.; our “Mystere et regeneration,”
pp. 82 ff.; E. Gasparini, La civiltd matriarcale degli Slavi (Venice,
1956), pp. 75 ff.

59. B. Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (London, 1929),
pp. 273-275, 422-423. The same custom obtains in the Caucasus; cf.
R. Bleichsteiner, “Masken und Festnachtsbrauche bei den Volkem des
Kaukasus,” Oesterr. Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde, n. s., VI (1952), 64 ff.

60. See above. Chapter III, p. 46.

Chapter V. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations

1. Ynglingasaga, Chapter VI, trans. W. Morris and E. Magnusson,
in Heimskringla (The Saga Library, III, London, 1893), I, 16-17.

2. L. Weiser, Altgermanische Junglingsweihen und Mdnnerbunde

NOTES

156

(Baden, 1927), p. 44; O. Hofler, Kultische Geheimbunde der Ger-^
manen (Frankfurt on the Main, 1934), pp. 170 ff.; J. de Vries,
Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1956), I, 454-
455; cf. also PI. XI, reproduction of the “altschwedischen Bronzeplatten
von Torslunda auf Oland,” showing a warrior clad in a wolfskin and
carrying a wolf’s head.

3. Tacitus, Germania, 31.

4. For the Taifali, cf. Ammianus Marcellinus, 31, 9, 5; for the
Heruli, cf. Procopius, De Bello Persico, II, 25. See also Weiser, Alt^
germanische Jiinglingsweihen, p. 42, and “Zur Geschichte der Altger-
manischen Todesstrafe und Friedlosigkeit,” Archiv. fur Religions^
wissenschaft, XXX (1933), 216. On the exercitus feralis (army of
shades) of the Harii (Tacitus, Germania, 43), cf. L. Weniger, “Feralis
exercitus,” Archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft, JX (1906), 201-247; X
(1907), 61-81, 229-256; Weiser, Altgermanische Jiinglingsweihen, pp.
39 ff.; Hofler, Kultische Geheimbunde, pp. 166 ff.

5. Volsunga Saga, Chapters 7-8; Weiser, Altgermanische Junglings^
weihen, pp. 40 ff.; Hofler, Kultische Geheimbunde, pp. 188 ff.

6. Cf. M. Danielli, “Initiation Ceremonial from Norse Literature,”
Folk-Lore, LVI (June, 1945), 229-230.

7. Georges Dum6zil, Mythes et Dieux des Germains (Paris, 1939),
pp. 94 ff.; Danielli, “Initiation Ceremonial,” pp. 236 ff. Jan de Vries
is inclined to see an initiatory pattern in the myth of the death of
Balder; cf. “Der Mythos von Balders Tod,” Archiv for Nordisk
Filologi, LXX (1955), 41-60, especially 57 ff. The berserker is not a
religious phenomenon peculiar to Indo-European societies. For China,
see M. Granet, Danses et ligendes de la Chine ancienne (Paris, 1928),

pp. 261-262.

8. Weiser, Altgermanische Jiinglingsweihen, passim; Hofler Kult--
ische Geheimbunde; Dum6zil, Mythes et Dieux des Germains, Cf. also
H5fler, “Der Germanische Totenkult und die Sagen vom Wilden
Heer,” Oberdeutschen Zeitschrift fiir Volkskunde, X (1936), 33 ff.;
A. Endter, Die Sage vom Wilden Jdger und von der Wilden Jagd
(Dissertation, Frankfurt, 1933). Some of Hofler’s conclusions have
been criticized; cf. H. M. Flasdieck, “Harlekin,” Anglia, LXI (1937),
293 ff.

9. S. Wikander, Der arische Mdnnerbund (Lund, 1938), pp. 82 ff.;
O. Widengren, Hochgottglaube im alten Iran (Uppsala, 1938), pp,
311 ff. Cf. also Widengren, “Stand und Aufgaben der iranischen
Religionsgeschichte,” Numen, I (1954), 65 ff.

10. Terrorization of women; H. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies:
A Study in Early Politics and Religion (New York, 1908), pp. 101 ff.,
118 ff. Right to steal: H. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Mannerbiinde
(Berlin, 1902), pp. 423 ff. (Africa); Hofler, Kultische Geheimbunde,
pp. 25 ff., 259 (Germans) ; Widengren, Hochgottglaube, p. 330 (Iran);

NOTES

157

R. Bleichsteiner, **Masken und Fastnachtsbrauche bei den Volkem
des Kaukasus,” Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde, n.s., VI
(1952), 18 ff., 70 (Caucasus).

11. For the Germanic world, cf. H5fler, Kultische Geheimbiinde,
pp. 12, 129, 287 ff., etc. Noises and uproar in the rituals of the
Japanese secret fraternities: A. Slawik, ‘‘Kultische Geheimbiinde der
Japaner und Germanen,” Wiener Beitrdge zur Kulturgeschichte und
Linguistik, IV (1936), 724, 732.

12. G. Dumezil, Horace et les Curiaces (Paris, 1942), pp. 16 ff.

13. Ibid., pp. 21 ff.

14. J. Vendry^s, “Les developpements de la racine nei- en celtique/’
Revue Celtique, XLVI (1929), 265 ff.; Dumezil, Horace et les
Curiaces, p. 20.

15. M. L. Sjoestedt, Dieux et hiros des Celtes (Paris, 1941), pp.
80 ff.; cf. Dumezil, Horace et les Curiaces,

16. Sjoestedt, Dieux et heros, p. 81.

17. Tain Bo Cualnge, trans. Joseph Dunn (London, 1914), pp.
60-78. Cf. Dumezil, Horace et les Curiaces, pp. 35-38.

18. Dumezil, Mythes et Dieux des Germains, pp. 103 ff.

19. Dumezil, Horace et les Curiaces, pp. 40 ff.

20. Cf. our “Puissance et sacralit6 dans Thistoire des religions,”
Eranos-Jahrbuch, XXI (1953), p. 36.

21. Our Le Chamanisme et les techniques archdiques de Vextase
(Paris, 1951), pp. 412 ff. The test by fire also forms part of the
berserker initiation; cf. Weiser, Altgermanische Junglingsweihen, pp.
75 ff. The berserker can pass unharmed over fire (ibid., pp. 76-
77), like shamans and ecstatics. The wild hunt (Wilde Jagd) is some-
times called the fiery hunt (feurige Jagd). On the relations between fire
and the Ancestor cult in Japan and among the Germans, see Slawik,
“Kultische Geheimbiinde der Japaner und Germanen,” p. 746 ff.

22. Cf. the references in our “Puissance et sacralite,” p. 35, and
Le Chamanisme, pp. 370 ff.

23. J. Abbott, The Keys of Power: A Study of Indian Ritual and
Beliefs (London, 1932), pp. 5 ff.

24. Our “Puissance et sacralite,” p. 37, citing K. Ronnow, “Ved.
Kratu, eine wortgeschichtliche Untersuchung,” Le Monde Oriental,
XXVI (1932), 1-90; and G. Dumezil, Naissance d*archanges (Paris,
1945), pp. 145 ff.

25. Our “Puissance et sacralit6,” p. 38, citing D. J. Hoens, Shanti:
A Contribution to Ancient Indian Religious Terminology (The Hague,
1951), pp. 177 ff.

26. Cf. our Forgerons et alchimistes (Paris, 1956), pp. 100 ff. and
passim,

27. For the different interpretations of the terms shaman and
shamanism, cf. our Le Chamanisme, pp. 17 ff., 430 ff. and passim.

158

NOTES

28. Ibid.^ pp. 26 ff.; see also A. P. Elkin, Aboriginal Men of High
Degree (Sydney, 1946), pp. 25 ff.

29. See the examples in our Le Chamanisme, p. 28.

30. Pripuzov and Mikhailowski, cited, ibid, p. 29.

31. S. Shirokogorow, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (Shang-
hai and London, 1935), pp. 346 ff., 351 ff.; our Le Chamanisme,
p. 30.

32. Mikhailowski, cited in our Le Chamanisme, pp. 31 ff.

33. See some examples in our Le Chamanisme, pp. 31, 68 ff.

34. Krivoshapkin, 1861; V. G. Bogoraz, 1910; Vitashevskij, 1911;
M. A. Czaplicka, 1914. Cf., more recently, A. Ohlmarks, Studien zum
Problem des Schamanismus (Lund and Copenhagen, 1939), pp. 11,
100 ff., 122 ff., and passim. See the critique of Ohlmarks’s method in
our article “Le probleme du chamanisme. Revue de VHistoire des
Religions, 131 (1946), 5-52, especially 9 ff.; cf. Le Chamanisme, pp.
36 ff. See also A. P. Elkin, Aboriginal Men of High Degree (Sydney,
1946), pp. 22-25, on the “normality” of Australian medicine men.

35. We have elsewhere discussed the meaning of the ritual return
to Chaos; cf. our Traite d*histoire des religions (Paris, 1949), pp.
306 ff., 340 ff., and The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York,
1954), pp. 17 ff., 51 ff.

36. G. W. Ksenofontov, Legendy i rasskazy o schamanach u
jakutov, burjat i tungusov, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1930), pp. 44 ff., used in
our Le Chamanisme, pp. 47-48. See the German translation in A.
Friedrich and G. Buddnis, Schamanengeschichten aus Sibirien (Mu-
nich, 1955), p. 137.

37. Ksenofontov, cited in our Le Chamanisme, p. 48; Friedrich
and Buddrus, Schmanengeschichten, pp. 139 ff.

38. Ksenofontov, cited in our Le Chamanisme, pp. 48 ff.; Friedrich
and Buddrus, Schamanengeschichten, pp. 156 ff.

39. T. Lehtisalo, Entwurf einer Mythologie der Jurak-Samojeden,
M6moires de la Soci6t6 Finno-Ougrienne, LIII (Helsinki, 1927), 146;
our Le Chamanisme, p. 49.

40. A. A. Popov, Tavgijcy, Materialy po etnografii avamskich i
vedeevskich tavgicev, Trudy Instituta Antropologii i Etnografii, 1, 5
(Moscow and Leningrad, 1936), pp. 84 ff.;/)ur Le Chamanisme, pp.
50 ff.

41. Ksenofontov, cited in our Le Chamanisme, p. 54; Friedrich and
Buddrus, Schamanengeschichten, pp. 212-213.

42. Ksenofontov, cited in our Le Chamanisme, p. 54; Friedrich and
Buddrus, Schamanengeschichten, pp. 209-210.

43. Dyrenkowa, cited in our Le Chamanisme, p. 54.

44. A. V. Anochin, cited in our Le Chamanisme, p. 54.

45. A. Metraux, shamanisme araucan,” Revista del instituto de
Antropologia de la Universidad nacional de Tucumdn, II (1942), 313-

NOTES

159

314; our Le Chamanisme, pp. 63-64.

46.. E. M. Loeb, ‘Tribal Initiation and Secret Societies,” University
of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology,
XXV, 3 (Berkeley, 1929), p. 269.

47. S. F. Nadel, cited in our Le Chamanisme, p. 65.

48. E. M. Loeb, “Shaman and Seer,” American Anthropologist,
XXXI (1929), 66 ff.

49. H. Ling-Roth, Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo
(London, 1896), I, 280-281; our Le Chamanisme, p. 66.

50. We shall soon devote a separate study to this problem.

51. W. Thalbitzer, “Les magiciens esquimaux, leurs conceptions
du monde, de Tame et de la vie,” Journal de la Societe des American-
istes, n. s., XXII (1930), 78.

52. K. Rasmussen, “Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos,” Re-
port on the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-1924, VII, No. I (Copen-
hagen, 1929), 114.

53. Cf. our Le Chamanisme, pp. 384 ff.; cf. also Chapter VI, p. 105.

54. Cf. our Le Chamanisme, pp. 151 ff.

55. Cf. A. Friedrich, “Knochen und Skelett in der Vorstellungs-
wert Nordasiens,” Wiener Beitrdge zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik,
V (1943), 189-247; Friedrich and Buddruss, Schamanengeschichten,
pp. 30 ff.; H. Nachtigall, “Die erhohte Bestattung in Nord- und
Hochasien,” Anthropos, XLVIII (1953), 44-70.

56. Cf. H. Nachtigall, “Die Kulturhistorische Wurzel der Schaman-
enskelettierung,” Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, LXXVII (1952), 188-197,
especially 191 ff.

57. Ch our Le Chamanisme, pp. 116-120, after N. N. Agapitov,
M. N. Changalov, and J. Partanen.

58. Uno Harva, Der Baum des Lebens (Helsinki, 1922), pp. 140 ff.,
and Die religiose Vorstellungen der altaischen Volker, F. F. Communi-
cations, No. 125 (Helsinki, 1938), pp. 492 ff. Cf. also our Le Chaman-
isme, pp. 121 ff.

59. Cf. our Le Chamanisme, pp. 237 ff.. Images et symboles (Paris,
1952), pp. 47 ff., and “Centre du monde, temple, maison,” Symposion
de ITstituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Rome, 1957).

60. Cf. our Le Chamanisme, pp. 175 ff.

61. Cf. E. Emsheimer, “Schamanentrommel und Trommelbaum,”
Ethnos, IV (1946), 166-18 our Le Chamanisme, pp. 159 ff.

62. Cf. our Le Chamanisme, pp. 123 ff.

63. Cf. ibid., p. 128.

64. On all this, see ibid. Cf . also D. Schroder, “Zur Struktur des Scha-
manismus,” Anthropos, L (1955), 848-881.

65. Cf. also H. Petri, “Der australische Medizinmann,” Annali
Lateranensi, XVI (1952), 159-317; XVII (1953), 157-225; our Le
Chamanisme, pp. 55 ff.

160

NOTES

66. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, p. 43.

67. Ibid., p. 31. Cf. also A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South--
East Australia (London, 1904), pp. 404 ff.; K. L. Parker, The Euahlayi
Tribe (London, 1905), pp. 25 ff.; Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 119 ff.,
etc.

68. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, p. 31; cf. also p. 116.

69. A. P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines (Sydney, 1938), p. 223;
cf. also his Aboriginal Men, p. 116.

70. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central
Australia (London, 1899), pp. 522 ff., and The Arunta (London
(1927)^ 11, 391 ff. In these last two examples, note the importance of
die cave as privileged space for initiations.

71. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central
Australia (London, 1904), pp. 480-481.

72. R. and C. Berndt, “A Preliminary Report of Field-Work in the
Ooldea Region, Western South Australia,” Oceania, XIV (1943),
56-61; Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 112-113. Elkin reports a similar
initiation among the aborigines of the Forrest River district, northern
Kimberley. The medicine men’s power comes from the Rainbow Ser-
pent, but it is a “fully qualified practitioner” who performs the initia-
tion; that is, carries the postulant to the sky, the Rainbow Serpent’s
domain. The master takes the form of a skeleton and, transforming the
postulant into an infant, puts him into a pouch, which he fastens to
his waist. “When near die sky, the latter throws the postulant out of
the pouch on to the sky, thus making him ‘dead’. Having reached the
sky, the doctor inserts into the young man some little rainbow-snakes
and some quartz crystals.” After bringing him back to earth, the
doctor introduces other magical substances into the postulant through
the navel and finally awakens him by touching him with a magical
stone. “The young man returns to his normal size, if he had been
changed, and next day he tries himself to go up to the sky.” His
instruction proper begins after this ecstatic experience. Elkin, Aboriginal
Men, pp. 139-140. Elkin rightly remarks that the reduction to infant
size and the resemblance between the doctor’s pouch and the kangaroo
pouch indicate that this is a ritual of rebirth.

73. Cf. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 43 ff. Medicine men’s journeys
to the sky: Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 358 ff., 389, 405, 436, 491, etc.;
Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 95 ff. (from R. M. Berndt’s field notes col-
lected among the Menindee of New South Wales), 107, 121 ff., etc.
On the ritual value of quartz ciystals in the making of medicine men,
cf. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 93, 98, 103, 107 ff., etc. Rock crystals
are introduced into the bodies of future South American shamans; cf.
A. M6traux, “Le Chamanisme chez les Indiens de rAm6rique du Sud
tropicale,” Acta Americana, II (1944), 215 ff. Cf. also our Le Chaman-
isme, pp. 62, 135 ff., etc.

NOTES

161

74. Cf. Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 405 ff., 383, 376 (burial ground);
Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 90 (journey to the bottom of a lake), 93
(dive to the bottom of a river), 105-106 (burial ground), etc.

75. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 91, 129, etc. Like the Asiatic and
American shamans, the Australian medicine men walk on fire un-
harmed {ibid., pp. 63 ff). On this specifically shamanic power, cf.
our Le Chamanisme, pp. 233, 385 ff., 412 ff., etc.

76. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, p. 36.

77. Ibid., pp. 40-41. On the relations between dismemberment of
the body and mummification, see A. Hermann, “Zergliedem imd Zu-
sammenfugen: Religionsgeschichtliches zur Mumifizierung.” Numen,
III (1956), 81-96.

78. Elkin, Aboriginal Men, pp. 76-77.

79. Cf. our Le Chamanisme, especially pp. 430 ff.

80. Cf. our “Symbolisme du ‘Vol Magique,’ ” Numen, III (1956),
1-13. On the “nostalgia for paradise” traceable in the ideology of
shamanism, cf. our “La Nostalgic du paradis dans les traditions prim-
itives,” Diogene, III (July, 1953), 31-45.

81. For the memory of prenatal existences among North American
shamans, see P. Radin, The Road of Life and Death (New York,
1945), p. 8; A. Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul among North
American Indians (Stockholm, 1953), pp. 418 ff.

Chapter VI. Patterns of Initiation in Higher Religions

1. Cf. G. W. Briggs, Gorakhnath and the Kanphata Yogis (Cal-
cutta and Oxford, 1938), p. 72; S. Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults
(Calcutta, 1945), p. 244. For the Buddhist and Tantric mysteries, cf.
H. von Glasenapp, Buddhistische Mysterien (Stuttgart, 1940); W.
Koppers, “Zum Ursprung des Mysterienwesen im Lichte von Volker-
kunde und Indologie,” Eranos-Jahrbuch, XI (1944), 215-275; W.
Ruben, “Indische Mysterien,” Anthropos, XLV (1950), 357-362.

2. Cf. Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults, pp. 259 ff.; our Le Yoga.
Immortalite et liberte (Paris, 1954), pp. 312 ff.

3. Cf. our Le Chamanisme et les techniques archdiques de Vextase
(Paris, 1951), pp. 195 ff. The famous rope trick of the yogis also be-
longs to a shamanic mythico-ritual complex; but since it does not in-
volve an initiatory ritual, it will not concern us here. On the rope trick,
see our Le Chamanisme, pp. 379 ff.; and Le Yoga, pp. 319 ff. Some
features of the initiation into the Ajivika order — a movement led by
Makkhali Gosala, the most dangerous rival of the Buddha — display an
extremely archaic character; for example, the candidate was buried to
the neck and his hairs were pulled out one by one; cf. A. L. Basham,
History and Doctrines of Ajivikas (London, 1951), p. 106; our Le
Yoga, p. 195.

162 NOTES

4. R. Bleichsteiner, UEglise jaune, French trans. (Paris, 1937); our
Le Yoga, p. 321.

5. Another Tantric rite whose initiatory structure has been clearly
preserved is ceremonial entrance into a mandala. Homologous with
the Australian bora and, in general, with any sacred space, the mandala
is at once an image of the world (imago mundi) and a pantheon. By
entering the mandala, the novice in some sort approaches the center
of the world; at the heart of the mandala he can accomplish the rupture
of planes and gain access to a transcendental mode of being; cf. G.
Tucci, J'eoria e pratica del mandala (Rome, 1949); our Le Yoga, pp.
223-231, 392-393.

6. Shivasamhita, I, 69-77; our Le Yoga, pp. 272 ff.

7. Aiajjhima-Nikaya, II, 17; cf. A. K. Coomaraswamy, “Some Pali
Words,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, IV (1939), 144 ff.

8. Cf. Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults, pp. 293 ff.; our Le Yoga,
pp. 282, 315.

9. On “Theseus* dive,” see H. Jeanmaire, Couroi et Courktes.
Essai sur Viducation spartiate et sur les rites d'adolescence dans Van--
tiquitS hellSnique (Lille, 1939), pp. 330 ff.

10. Ibid., pp. 323 ff., 338 ff.

11. Cf. scholiast on Plato, Laws, 633 B, quoted in Jeanmaire,
Couroi, p. 552. On the krypteia and lycanthropy, see ibid., pp. 540 ff.
See also Chapter V, pp. 81 ff.

12. Cf. J. Harrison, Themis (Cambridge, 1912).

13. S. Wikander, Der arische Mdnnerbund (Lund, 1938); G.
DumdzU, Horace et les Curiaces (Paris, 1942).

14. The bibliography is immense. The essential references will be
found at the end of R. Pettazzoni’s “Les Myst^res Grecs et les religions
b, myst^re de Tantiquite. Recherches r6centes et probl^mes nouveaux,”
Cahiers d*Histoire Mondi(de, II, 2 and 3 (Paris, 1955), 303-312, 661-
667, Bibliography.

15. For the literary sources, see L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek
States (Oxford, 1907), III, 29-213. For archaeological exploration, see
F. Noack, Eleusis: die baugeschichtliche Entwicklung des Heiligtums
(Berlin and Leipzig, 1927) ; K. Kuruniotis, “Das eleusinische Heiligtum
von den Anfangen bis zur vorperikleische Zeit,” Archiv fur Religions-
wissenschaft, >&XII (1935), 52-78; G. E. Mylonas, The Hymn to
Demeter and Her Sanctuary at Eleusis, Washington University Studies
in Languages and Literature, XIII (St. Louis, 1942). Cf. also M. P.
Nilsson, “Die eleusinische Gottheiten,” Archiv fur Religionswissen-
schaft, XXXU (1935), 79-141; S. Bitrem, “Eleusinia: les myst^res et
Pagriculture,” Symbolae Osloenses, XX (1940), 133-151; W. F. Otto,

Sinn der eleusinischen Mysterien,’* Eranos-Jahrbuch, DC (1939),
83-112 (translated as *The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries,” in
The Mysteries, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, II [New York,
19551, 14-31).

NOTES

163

16. Cf., among others, K. H. E. de Jong, Das antike Mysterienwesen
in religionsgeschichtlicher, ethnologischer und psychologischer Beleuch-
tung (Leiden, 1909), pp. 20 ff.; A. Kdrte, “Zu den eleusinischen Mys-
terien,” Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft, XVIII (1915), pp. 116-
127. But see the pertinent remarks of W. F. Otto, directed especially
against the sexual interpretations of A. Dieterich and A. Korte, “Mean-
ing of the Eleusinian Mysteries,” pp. 22 ff.

17. Stobaeus, Florilegium, 120, 28, reproducing a fragment* of
Themistius or Plutarch.

18. Hippolytus, Philososphoumena, V, 8; cf. Famell, Cults, III, 177;
A. Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1922), p. 138.

19. Otto, “Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries,” p. 25, developing
a conjecture of L. Deubner, Attische Feste (Berlin, 1932), p. 86.

20. Cf. R. Pettazzoni, 7 Misteri (Bologna, 1924), pp. 21 ff.; W. K.
C. Guthrie, Orpheus and the Greek Religion (London, 1935; 2nd ed.,
1952), pp. 121 ff. On the bull-roarer in primitive religions, see above,
Chapters I-II, and Pettazzoni, “Les Mysteres dans I’antiquite,” pp. 308
ff.

21. Cf. A. E. Jensen, Die religiose Weltbild einer friihen Kultur
(Stuttgart, 1948), pp. 66 ff.

22. Metamorphoses, XI, 21, 24, reading, with S. Angus {The Mys-
tery-Religions and Christianity [London, 1925], p. 96, note 4), sacrum,
Cf. also de Jong, Antike Mysterienwesen, pp. 207 ff.

23. H. Hepding, Attis, seine Mythen und sein Kult (Giessen, 1903),
p. 196; Angus, Mystery-Religions, p. 97.

24. Firmicus Maternus, De Errore profanarum religionum, 18; cf.
de Jong, Antike Mysterienwesen, pp. 203 ff.

25. Sallustius, De Diis et Mundo, 4.

26. Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, p. 10, fragment translated by S.
Angus, Mystery -Religions, p. 100.

27. Cf. R. Reitzenstein, Die hellenistische Mysterienreligionen, 2nd
ed. (Leipzig, 1920), pp. 29 ff.; Angus, Mystery-Religions, pp. 106 ff.
These concepts, it should be noted, belong to the Hellenistic period
and differ radically from the religious horizon of Homer and Hesiod.
For Egypt of the Greco-Roman period, cf. H. I. Bell, Cults and
Creeds in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Liverpool, 1953), pp. 87 ff., 102 ff.

28. De Republica, VI, 17.

29. Cf. Angus, Mystery -Religions, p. 110, note 5.

30. Protrepticus, VIII, 4.

31. Institutiones Divinae, VI, 21; Angus, Mystery-Religions, p. 106.

32. Hymn to Demeter, w. 480-482; Pindar, Threnoi, Frag. X;
Sophocles, Frag. 719 (Dindorf), 348 (Didot). Cf. Angus, Mystery-
Religions, pp. 238 ff. A difference between the post-mortem destiny of
initiates into the secret societies and noninitiates is already to be found
among some primitive peoples (e.g., Melanesians, Africans).

NOTES

164

33. Cf. A. D. Nock, Conversion (Oxford, 1933), especially pp.
138-155 (‘The Conversion of Lucius”).

34. Research viewpoints and bibliography will be found in K.
Priimm, Religionsgeschichtliches Handbuch fur den Raum der altchrist-
lichen Umwelt (Freiburg, 1943), pp. 308-356; A. D. Nock, “Hellen-
istic Mysteries and Christian Sacraments,” Mnemosyne, Series 4, V
(1952), 117-213; H. Rahner, “The Christian Mystery and the Pagan
Mysteries,” in The Mysteries, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, II
(New York, 1955), 337-401. Cf. also O. Casel, Das christliche KuU
tusmysterium, 2nd ed. (Regensburg, 1935), and Das christliche FesU
mysterium (Paderborn, 1941).

35. For the following, we use the translations and commentaries of
T. H. Caster, The Scriptures of the Dead Sea Sect (New York, 1956),
and especially the studies of Krister Stendhal, Oscar Cullman, and
Karl Georg Kuhn in K. Stendhal (ed.). The Scrolls and the New
Testament (New York, 1957).

36. Stendhal, The Scrolls, p. 10; Kuhn, ibid., p. 78.

37. Nock, “Hellenistic Mysteries,” p. 199.

38. Ibid., p 100.

39. Rahner, “The Christian Mystery,” p. 362.

40. See the references to patristic texts in our Images et symboles
(Paris, 1952), pp. 213 ff.; and Rahner, “The Christian Mystery,” pp.
380 ff.

41. Cf. the references in Rahner, ‘The Christian Mystery,” p. 392,
note 20.

42. James of Sarug, Consecration of the Baptismal Water, cited
ibid., p. 395.

43. Protrepticus, XII, 119, 3; 120, 1 (trans. Butterworth) , cited ibid.,
p. 369.

44. Ibid., p. 365, citing G. Anrich, Antike Mysterienreligionen und
Urchristentum (Munster, 1932), pp. 157, 158; and Ecclesiastica
hierarchia I, F (J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series
Graeca [Paris, 1857-86], III, 372 A).

45. The documentary material will be found in O. Hofler, Kultische
Geheimbunde der Germanen, (Frankfurt on the Main, 1934), I; R.
Wolfram, Schwerttanz und Mdnnerbund (Kassel, 1935); H. Metraux,
Schweizer Jugendleben in fiinf Jahrhunderten. Geschichte und Eigenart
der Jugend und ihre Biinde im Gebiet der protestantischen deutschen
Schweiz (Aarau, 1942); U. Helfenstein, Beitrdge zur Problematik der
Lebensalter in der mittleren Geschichte (Zurich, 1952).

46. Cf. our Comentarii la legenda Mesterului Manole (Bucharest,
1943) and Forgerons et alchimistes (Paris, 1956).

47. Text edited and translated by M. Bertholet, Collection des
anciens alchimistes grecs (Paris, 1887), pp. 107-112, 115-118; see also
the new English translation by F. S. Taylor, Ambix, I (1937), pp.

NOTES

165

88-92. Cf. C. G. Jung, “Die Visionen des Zosimus,” in Von den Wur*
zeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1954), pp. 153 ff.; our Forgerons et
alchimistes, p. 153.

48. J. G. Gichtel, Theosophia Practica, III, 13, 5, cited in our
Forgerons et alchimistes, p. 164.

49. Out of the immense literature devoted to this problem, I mention
especially G. L. Kittredge, A Study of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight (Cambridge, Mass., 1916); A. Brown, The Origin of the Grail
Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1943); and R. S. Loomis, Celtic Myth
and Arthurian Legend (New York, 1927).

50. Cf. J. Marx’s analysis. La Legende arthurienne et le Graal
(Paris, 1952), pp. 281 ff.

51. Cf. A. Fierz-Monnier, Initiation und Wandlung, Zur Geschichte
des altfranzdsischen Romans im 12 Jahrhundert, Studiorum Roman-
orum, V (Bern, 1951).

52. P. Saintyves, Les Contes de Perrault et les recits paralleles
(Paris, 1923); J. de Vries, Betrachtungen zum Mdrchen, besonders in
seine Verhdltnis zu Heldensage und Mythos, FF Communications, No.
150 (Helsinki, 1954). Cf. also H. von Beit, Symbolik des Mdrchens.
Versuch einer Deutung (Bern, 1952), I, for an interpretation of initi-
atory themes in terms of the psychology of C. G. Jung.

53. Cf. L. Valli, // linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei Fedeli d* A more
(Rome, 1928); R. Ricolfi, Studi sui **Fedeli d*Amore/* (Milan,
1933), I.

54. “D’amur ne doivent reveler

Les consiaus, mas tres bien celer . .

C'est des fiez d* amours, 11: 499-500, cited by Ricolfi, Studi,
pp. 68-69.

55. signifies ‘without’ and mor signifies ‘death’; put them together
and we have ‘without death.’ ’’ Original cited ibid., p. 63.

56. See our article, “Les Mythes du monde moderne,” La Nouvelle
NRF (September, 1953).

57. From a certain point of view, psychoanalysis can be regarded
as a secularized form of initiation, that is, an initiation accessible to a
desacralized world. But the pattern is still recognizable: the descent
into the depths of the psyche, peopled with monsters, is equivalent to a
descent to the Underworld; ^e real danger implied by such a descent
could be connected, for example, with the typical ordeals of traditional
societies. The result of a successful analysis is the integration of the
personality, a psychic process not without resemblance to the spiritual
tranformation accomplished by genuine initiations.

58. Cf. H. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies: A Study in Early
Politics and Religion (New York, 1908), pp. 191 ff.

INDEX

Achilles, 109
Adonis, 117

Africa, 22, 23-25, 26, 30-33, 35, 37.
42, 73, 74-76, 77, 92, 130
57

Alchemy, initiatory patterns in, 123-
24

and new body, 108
and return to womb, 57-58, 124
Alchera times, 6-7, 12
Altaic people, 91, 94
Altar, 120

Ammasilik Eskimos, 92
Ancestors, x, xii, xiv, 5, 19, 23, 29,
34, 37 ff., 67, 74, 84, 129, 132
An^akuts, 92

Animals, and initiation ceremonies,
23-24, 35, 38, 44
See also Beasts of prey
Antero, 64
Anthropology, ix
Anthroposophy, 133
Anula tribe, 22
Aphrodite, 109
Apuleius, 112
Araucanian people, 77, 91
Argonauts, 65
Ariadne, 109
Arioi Society, 26
Aristotle, 110
Arm-blood, 49-50
Arnhem Land, 43, 47
Arthurian cycle, 124-26
Arunta tribe, 7, 12, 97
circumcision and subincision, 21-
22, 25

Ascension, symbols of, 14, 17-18,
70, 75, 77-78, 80, 89, 93-94,
97, 99 ff., 130

Asceticism, 67-68, 85-86, 106-7
Ashley-Montagu, M. F., 27
Asia, 67, 77-78, 110
influence in Australia, 99-102
shamanism, see saiftnuwilgim

Australia, Asiatic influences in, 99-
102

initiation mysteries, 4-20, 67, 74,
77, 92, 129, 130
of girls, 41 ff.

of medicine men, 96-100, 105,
111

initiatory ordeals, 21-28, 30, 35,
37-40

Kunapipi cult, 26, 47-51, 58
Avam-Samoyeds, 90

Babali tribe, 37
Bad tribe, 6
Baiamai, 5-6
Baiame, 13-14
Baisieux, Jacques de, 126-27
Bakhimba society, 75
Bali, 56, 100
Banda tribe, 75
Banquets, ritual, 116-17
Bantu peoples, 54, 56
Bapedi tribe, 25
Baptism, ix, 116, 117, 120
Barberino, Francesco da, 126
Barrier, revolving, 65
Bastian, A., 31
Baths, ritual, 67, 72, 85, 116
Bear, 72, 81, 83, 92
Beasts of prey, 23-24, 72, 81-84, 130
See also Animals
Bella Bella tribe, 69, 70
Bemdt, R. and C., 97-98
Bemdt, R. M., 26, 43, 49-50
Berserkers, 1, 72, 81-84
Biamban (Great Master), 11, 12
Binbinga tribe, 14
Birds, beaks of, 65, 66, 70
Birth, see Childbirth; Rebirth
Bisexuality, 25-26
Bismarck Archipelago, 27
Bittremieux, L6o, 75
Blood, 5, 18, 33, 34, 38
arm-blood, 49-50

167

168

INDEX

Blood — Continued
and female initiations, 44-45
and shamanism, 90 ff., 93, 96
and subincision, 25-28
Body, new, 107-8
Bohdvar, 83
Bones, 90, 92. 97, 99
Bora ceremony, 4-7, 17
Boubia tribe, 26

Brahmanic initiations, 52, 53-57,
104, 114

Breathing, embryonic, 57, 58
Bremen, Adam von, 84
Bridge, crossing over, 52
Brimo and Brimos, 111
Brown, Arthur, 125
Buddha, 57, 86

Buddhism, 53-54, 58, 92, 107, 114
Mahayana, 106
Bugari times, 6

Bull-roarers, 4, 8, 9, 10-11, 12-14,
16, 47, 49, 50, 83, 111, 129
and circumcision, 21-24
Buriat people, 88, 91, 93-94
Bushongo tribe, 32-33

Cabin initiatory, symbolism of, 35-

37, 42-44, 63

as womb, xiv, 55, 56, 59
Call, see Vocation
Cannibal Society, 69-72
Cannibalism, 69, 71, 73
Cathba, 84
Cattle stealing, 83
Caul, 54

Caves, symbolism of, 58, 69, 97
Celestial Beings, 37, 74, 77
Ceram, 31, 35
Chamacoco tribe, 77
Chaos, xiii, xiv, 89
Chastity, 53
Chatti people, 81
Chepara tribe, 17
Chick, symbolism of, 54
ChUdbirth, 45, 51, 52, 80
China, 58, 59. 100
Christianity, ix, 103-4, 113, 115-21,
132-33
Cicero, 112

Circumcision, 4, 16, 18, 31, 35, 37,

38, 47, 129, 130
and bull-roarer, 21-25

Clam, giant {Tridacna deresa)^ 62
Clement of Alexandria, 110, 113,
120

Clown Society, Fort Rupert, 69, 70
Cold, resistance to, 85
Comorin, 57
Conchobar, 84

Confraternities, 2, 38, 45, 74, 76
Conversion, 135
Coomaraswamy, A. K., 65
Copper pillar, 69-70
Cord, magic, 17, 100
Coroado tribe, 42
Cosmic Tree, 78, 119
Cosmocrator, 121
Cow, 56-5’7
Crab Woman, 62
Crocodiles, 23, 35, 36
Cross, symbolism of, 119-20
Crystals, 17, 97, 99
Cuchulainn, initiation of, 84-85
Curetes, 109

Dancing Societies, Kwakiutl, 67, 68-
72, 77, 78, 85
Dante Alighieri, 127
Daramulun (Dharamulun), 8, 11-14
Darkness, xiv, 9, 16, 36, 42, 56
Dayaks, 92
Deacon, A. B., 62
Dead Sea manuscripts, 115, 117
Death, 80, 83

and circumcision, 23-24
in darkness, 9

initiatory, symbolism of, 13-14,
18, 29, 30-35, 36-37, 38-39,
51, 52, 57, 59, 89-93, 101-2,
106-8, 110-12, 130, 131-32,
136

and resurrection, xii ff., 12-13, 29,
34, 38, 73-76, 91, 108, 122,
130, 135

and speech, 15-16
temporary, 95
and Underworld, 61-64
Demeter, 110, 111
Denmark, 45
Dephinas, 58

Destiny, and spinning, 45-46
Dieiri tribe, 26, 38
Dietary tatoos and prohibitions, 5,
12, 14, 15, 27, 33, 38-39,
42-43, 67

Diksha ritual, 54-55, 58-59, 104
Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagitc,
120

Dionysus, rites of, 109-12

INDEX 169

Dismemberment, 74, 89, 90-92, 96,
98, 101, 105-6, 108, 130
Divine Beings, 6, 9, 10, 13-14, 19,
22 ff., 47, 129, 132
Djamar, 6

Djunggawon ritual, 49
Dluwulaxa tribe, 69
Dogs, 81, 84
Door, active, 65
Dream Time, 6, 19
Dreaming Period, 48, 49
Dreams, 87, 89. 106, 128, 135
Drinking, prohibitions against, 15
Dumezil, Georges, 83, 85
Dvi-ja (twice-born), 53-54, 104
Dyaks, 44

Eagle, beak of, 65, 66
Earth Spirit, 29

Ecstasy, 3, 39, 64, 83, 87, 93, 100-

101 , 102

techniques of, 94-96
Egg, symbolism of, 54, 79
Elema tribe, 33

Eleusinian mysteries, 103, 109-15
Eliot, T. S., 134
Elkin, A. P., 96-97, 99-100
Embryonic breathing, 57, 58
Embryonic state, see Womb, return
to

Emu, 5, 97

Epilepsy, 88

Epopteia, 111

Eravo (Men’s House), 33

Eskimos, 88, 92

Essenes, 115-17

Ethnology, 1-2, 16, 21, 25, 41, 43
Eucharist,- 116-17

Fairy tales, 126
Fakirs, 73, 100
Fasting, 67

Fedeli d* A more, 126-27
Fertility, 14, 42, 46, 48, 79-80
Fiji, 33

Fingers, eating with, 37
Fmland, 63

Fire, mastery over, 85-86, 95
roasting at, 7-8, 99
throwing of, 16-17, 50
walking on, 100
Firmicus Matemus, 112
Fish, 36, 63
Fisher King, 124
Flight, magic, 100, 101

Food, see Dietary taboos and pro-
hibitions

Forest, symbolism of, 31, 36-37, 42,

69

Forest Spirit, 31

Fort Rupert, Clown Society of, 69,

70

Fraternities, 2
Frau Holle, 46
Frazer, Sir J. G., 44
Freemasonry, 133
Frobenius, L., 73

Fury {furor), 12, U, 84-85, 87, 88,
130

Gabun, 78

Ganda, ceremony, 32-33
Gates, symbolism of, 65
Ge festival, 77
Gestation, 53-57
Ghosts, 15, 31, 32, 37, 83
Gichtel, J. G., 124
Gilgamesh, 64
Gillen, F. J., 12, 14, 97
Girls* initiation, 41-44, 67
degrees in, 44-47
Gnabaia, 22

Gnosticism, 112, 113, 115, 119, 121
Goddesses, 105, 110
of Death, 63-64
of Destiny, 45

Gods, xii-xv, 19, 21, 22, 40, 46, 68,
72, 74, 77, 88, 96, 107, 121,
129, 132

Gold, symbolism of, 56, 124
Gorakhnath, 105
Grail quest, 124-25
Great Master {biamban), 11, 12
Great Mother, 47-51, 52, 56-57, 58,
61 ff., 112
Great Spirit, 21-22
Greco-Oriental mysteries, see Mys-
teries
Guilds, 122
Guringal ceremony, 8
Gusinde, M., 28, 29

Haddon, A. C,, 26
Haeckel, Josef, 77
Hag of Hiisi, 63
Hair, pulling out of, 4, 18
Halakwulup tribe, 28-29
Hamatsa Dance, 69-72
Harva, Uno, 93
Hathayoga, 108

170

INDEX

Healer, 71, 72
Heating, body, 72, 84-85
symbolism of, 85-87
Heaven, 66, 69, 75, 77-78, 80, 89 ff.,
93-96, 97, 99, 119-20, 130
kingdom of, 118-19
Helios, 110

Hell, 62, 64, 90, 91, 94 ff.. 106, 110,
125, 130

See also Underworld
Hentze, C., 62
Hermeticism, 112, 113, 123
Herodotds, 56

Heroes, x, xi, xv, 19, 21, 52, 74, 97,
99, 121, 125, 134-35
initiations of, 61-63, 66, 130
berserkers, 1, 72, 81-84, 87
Cuchulainn, 84-85
heat symbolism, 85-87
Henili people, 81
Hiisi, Hag of, 63
Hinduism, 92, 100, 106
Hine-mi-te-po, 61

Hiranyagarbha rite, 56-57, 58, 104
Hoffler, Otto, 83
Horse, symbolism of, 79
Hottri, 83

House, ceremonial, symbolism of, 69

Howitt, A. W., 7, 14

Hunting magic, 80

Hut, see Cabin

Huysmans, J. K., 132-33

Hynm to Demeter, 113

lamblichus, 114
Iglulik Eskimos, 92
Ilmarinen, 63
Imagination, 125-26, 135
Immortality, 56, 59, 62, 64, 125,
134
Incest, 58

India, 42, 65, 86, 100, 103
initiations, 53-57, 104-8, 114
Individuation, 135
Indra, 55, 86
Initiation, ix-xv
and Christianity, 115-21
Europe, see Europe
Greece, 108-15
heroic, see Heroes
India, see India
individual, 66-72
and literary themes, 124-28
primitive religions, see Primitive
religions

Initiation — Continued
shamanic, see Shamanism
Symplegades, 64-66
types of, 2-3
Iran, 94, 100, 109
Ireland, 84-85, 125
Iruntarinia, 97
Isis, 112

Itchumundi tribe, 27
Ituri pygmies, 22, 37

Jabim tribe, 36
Jaguars, 23

Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana, 65
Japan, 34, 46, 83
Jason, 65
Jaws, 65

Jeanmaire, H., 109
Jelmalandji, 49
Jeraeil mysteries, 10-11
Jesus Christ, 116-18, 120
Jewish people, 115-17
John, St., 116
Joyce, James, 134
Joyce, T. A., 32
Julunggul, 48-49
Jung, C. G., 135

Kai tribe, 36
Kaiemunu, 36
Kaitish tribe, 14
Kalevala, 63
Kamilaroi tribe, 5
Karadjeri tribe, 16, 17, 22, 25, 26-27,
38

Kavirondo Bantu, 54
Kittredge, George Lyman, 125
Knights Templars, 124
Koppers, W., 28, 29
Kore, no. Ill
Kovave, 33
Kra, 29
Kran, 29
Kukata tribe, 22
Kuksu society, 91
Kuman tribe, 27
Kunapipi cult, 26, 47-51, 58
Kundalini, 86
Kumai tribe, 7, 17
initiation mystery, 10-11, 22, 28,
130

Kuta confraternity, 74
Kuta Lisimba society, 79
Kwakiutl Dancing Societies, 68-72,
77, 78, 85

Labyrinth, 62, 108-9
Lactantius, 113
Ladder, 94

Language, new, 31, 75
special, 37, 87, 126
Lapland, 64
Laribuga ceremony, 17
Last Supper, 116-17
Laws of Manu, 53
Layard, J., 62
Le-hev-hev, 62
Lehtisalo, T., 90
Lenape tribe, 77
Leopards, 23, 32, 72, 78-79
Leviathan, 64
Lions, 23
Literary themes, and initiation, 124-
128, 134-35
Lommel, Herman, 54
Loomis, Roger Sherman, 125
Lu’ningu, 49
Lycurgus, 109

Maamba, 17
Madness, 72, 79
See also Fury; Heating
Magic, 64, 72, 100, 107, 130
and female initiations, 47, 80
heat, see Heating
substances, 12, 97, 98-99
Magwanda tribe, 25
Maidu tribe, 77
Maier, Michael, 58
M airy a societies, 83
Maitrayani Samhita, 55
Makua tribe, 31
Malekula, 62, 92
Manangs, 92
Mandan Indians, 76, 77
Mandja tribe, 75
Mdnnerbiinde, 2, 81, 125
Maoris, 61
Marsaba, 35
Marshall Islands, 42
Masai tribe, 26
Masks. 36, 39, 71, 83
Societies of, 73, 74
Masons, 122
Mathews, R. H., 5, 8
Matsyendranath, 105
Matter of Britain, 124-25
Maui, 52, 61
Mayanamati, Queen, 105
Mayombe, 75

INDEX 171

Medicine men, 2-3, 12, 38, 39, 73,
78, 85, 87, 92, 101-2
Australian, initiations of, 96-100,
105

Melanesia, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 50,
76, 99, 130

Menstruation, 27, 41 ff., 47, 67, 80
Meriah, 92

Mesopotamia, 57, 94, 100
Messiah, 116-18
Metanira, Queen, 110
Military organizations, 79, 83-84,
85, 87, 109, 122
Millstones, 52
Mithraism, 93-94, 112
Mitla tribe, 69
Mohammedanism, 86
Moksha, 106
Monkeys, 32
Monsters, xiv, 23, 83

swallowing by, see Swallowing
Moon, connection of, with women,
42, 45-46
Moon Woman, 29
Mordvins, 79

Mother, separation from, 7-10, 30,
130

Mother Earth, 51, 52, 58, 61-62, 63,
66, 93, 104
Mountains, 65
crevasses, 58
Mukti, 106

Mummification, 99-100
Mungan-Ngaua, 10
Murder, initiatory, 23-24
Murring tribe, 8, 11
Musgrave Ranges aborigines, 16
Mycerinus, 56

Mysteries, and Christianity, 118-21
Greco-Oriental, ix, 1, 2, 22, 103-4,
109-15, 123, 130

Mysticism, 1, 38, 52, 55, 65, 72, 73,
78, 107

Names, new, 28, 31, 68, 74, 75
Nanda ceremony, 33-34
Nandi tribe, 26
Narriniycri tribe, 15
Necht, sons of, 84-85
Neo-Buddhism, 133
Neoplatonism, 114, 115, 120-21
Neo-Vedantism, 133
Nereids, 108

Nettles, symbolism of, 74
New birth, see Rebirth

172

New Guinea, 21, 26, 27, 30,
35-36, 37, 39
New Hebrides, 42
New Year rites, xiii
New 2^1and, 42
Ngakola society, 75
Nganaoa, 63
Ngarigo tribe, 15
Ngoye (Ndassa) tribe, 74
Night watch, 125
Nmes,John, 27
Nirvana, 106
Niyami, 33
Nootka Indians, 70
North America, 15, 22, 30, 31, 39,
42

initiations, 66-72, 77-78, 87, 94
secret societies, 68-73, 76
Nose, perforation of, 27
Nuba tribe, 26
Nudity, ritual, 26, 32
Nyembe association, 78-79

Occultism, 133-34
Ocher, 8, 12, 17, 26, 43, 49, 50, 98
Olim, 30

Olympiodorus, 114
Opossum game, 17
Opus alchymicum, 123-24
Ordeals, see Primitive religions, in-
itiatory ordeals
Orphism, 109-12, 115
Osiris, 92, 111, 112
Other World, 64-66, 69, 90, 113, 126
Otto, Walter, 111

Palestine, 116
Pangwe tribe, 31-32, 78
Papua, 30, 36, 100
Paracelsus, 57-58
Paradoxical passage, 52, 65, 130
Patasiva tribe, 31
:Patwin tribe, 91
Paul, St., 114, 116, 118
Pearl shell, 99
Perdval, 124, 125
Personality, ^integration of, 68, 72,
89

Pftanzervolker, 43
Phrygia, 112
Pid^gton, R., 17
Pillar, copper, 69-70
Pindar, 113
Pitjandara tribe, 22
Pitta-Pitta tribe, 26

INDBX

Plains Indians, 77
Plato, 111
Platonism, 114

Pole, symbolism of, 5, 17, 49, 50, 67,
69-70, 77-78, 89, 94
Porno tribe, 77
Popov, A. A., 90
Possession, 68, 70-72
Pot, symbolism of, 54, 56-57
Potanin, 93
Prajapati, 56, 86
Primitive religions:

initiation mysteries, 1-4
Australian medicine men, 96-
100

and collective regeneration, 18-
20

death, symbolism of, 13-14
descent to Underworld, 61-63
girls, see Girls’ initiation
Kumai tribe, 10-11, 22, 28, 130
North America, 66-72, 77-78,
87, 94

return to womb, see Womb
sacred ground, 4-7, 34, 49-50
and secret societies, 77-80
separation from mother, 7-10
Yuin tribe, 11-13, 22
initiatory ordeals, xii ff.
bull-roarer and circumcision, 21-
25

death, initiatory, 30-35
Kunapipi cult, 26, 47-51, 58
meaning of, 14-18
revelation, degrees of, 37-40
subincision, symbolism of, 25-28
Proclus 1 14

Psycholo^, 25, 36, 80, 126, 128, 134
Puberty rites, see Primitive reli^ons,
initiation mysteries and initia-
tory ordeals
Pythagoreanism, 114

Quartz crystals, 17, 99
Quest, 3, 87, 96

Rahner, Hugo, 120
Rapine, right of, 83
Ravishing, 69

Rebirth, xii, xiii, 18, 28-29, 31-32,
36-37, 51, 63, 101, 130
Indian initiations, 53-57, 107-8
Reeds, dancing, 65
Regeneration, collective, 18-20

INDEX

173

Resurrection, 12-13, 29, 34, 38,
73-76, 91, 108, 122, 130, 135
of Jesus, 117-18
Revelation, 3, 29, 134
degrees of, 37-40
Rig-Veda, 53, 54, 56
Rocks, clashing, 52, 65
Rome, 108, 109, 119, 121
Rooke Island, 35
Roth, W. E., 25-26
Russia, 46

Sacrality, 58-59, 70, 80, 86, 104
Sacred ground, 4-7, 34, 49-50
Sacred history, x-xi, xiv, 20, 47
Sacred Time, 68
Saintyves, Paul, 126
Sallustius, 112
Salt water, 71, 85
Samoa, 37
Samoyeds, 90, 94
Sanskrit, 86
Scarification, 4, 18, 67
Schleswig, 45

Schmidt, Wilhelm, 21, 26, 28, 44

Schurtz, Heinrich, 1

Secret societies, 2, 3, 31, 33, 38, 39,

41, 67-68, 122, 129, 133
Kwakiutl Dancing Societies, 68-

72, 77, 78, 85
men, 72-77, 81, 83, 125
and puberty rites, 77-80
women, 45, 78-80

Segregation, 4, 15, 26, 29, 32, 35,
67-68, 130
of girls, 41-44
Selish tribe, 77
Selknam tribe, 29-30
Semen, 54, 55, 58
Sexuality, 3, 14, 18, 24-25, 27, 38-39,

42, 62

and female initiations, 46-47
Shamanism, 2-3, 17-18, 38, 52, 64,
72, 80, 105 ff., 109, 129
dissemination of, 100-102
initiations, 66-68, 73, 74, 76-77,
78, 123, 130
ordeals, 90-93
public rites, 93-94
techniques of ecstasy, 94-96
vocation, 87-89
and magical heat, 72, 85-87
Shushwap tribe, 42
Siberia. 85, 87-91, 94, 96, 105, 111
Sickness, initiatory, 72, 76, 88-91,
106

Siddhas, 105

Siggeir, King, 81-82

Sight, prohibitions against, 16

Sigmund, 82

Signy, 82

Sinfjotli, 82

Sjoestedt, Marie-Louise, 84
Skeleton, 92-93, 96, 102, 105
Skin, wrapping in, 54, 55-56
Sky, ascent to, see Ascension
Sky God, 7, 17, 22
Sleep, prevention of, 14-15
Smiths, 64, 86, 122
Snakes, 35, 48-50, 82, 97-98, 99
Socrates, 114

Soma sacrifice, 54, 55, 104
Sophocles, 113
Sotho tribe, 26
Soul, and mysteries, 114-15
of shaman, 88, 95, 100
of woman, 46

South America, 22, 23, 62-63, 70,
77, 94

Soyot people, 88

Speech, prohibitions against, 15-16
Spencer, B., 12, 14, 97
Spinning, 45-46
Spiral, bark, 14
Spirit, tutelary, 66-68
Spirits, ancestral, 87 ff., 90-92, 95-96
Stealing, 31, 83, 109
Stendhal, Krister, 116
Sticks, eating with, 37
Stone, sacred, of Ngakola, 75
Strehlow, C., 22
Subincision, 4, 18, 21, 38
symbolism of, 25-28
Sun, 56, 59

prohibition against seeing, 42
Sun Man, 29

Superhuman Beings, 19, 21 ff., 95
Supernatural Beings, x ff., xiv, xv,
24, 30, 39-40, 48, 83, 96 ff.,
101, 129, 131, 132
Supreme Beings, 5-6, 11, 17-18, 19,
22, 23, 38, 74, 80
Tierra del Fuego, 28-30
Wiradjuri tribe, 13-14
Yuin tribe, 11-13
Swahili tribe, 42

Swallowing, initiatory motif of, 13-
14, 35-37, 48-49, 51. 52,
62-64, 73, 75, 77, 78. 98
Symbolism, 2
Symplegades, 64-66, 130

174

INDEX

Synesius, 114
Syria, 116, 120

Taboos, see Dietary taboos and pro-
hibitions
Tacitus, 81
Tahiti, 26
Taifali people, 81
Tantrism, 1, 86, 105-8
Taoism, 57
Tathagata, 57
Tattooing, 18, 31, 43
Tchoed rite, 105, 107
Teacher of Righteousness, 117
Teeth, blackening of, 43

extraction of, 4, 12, 13-14, 18, 38
Telekut people, 91
Tessmann, Giinther, 31-32
Theseus, 108-9
Theosophical Society, 133
Thurmulun, 14
Tibet, 100, 105
Tierra del Fuego, 15
puberty rites, 28-30, 41, 129
Time, beginning of, x ff., xiv
reintegration of, 6-7, 40, 129
and spinning, 45-46
Undale, Norman B., 16, 38
Tomb, and baptismal font, 120
Torday, E., 32
Torres Strait, 26, 99
Tossing of novices, 16-17
Totemism, 43
Trance, 64, 69, 87, 95
Transcendental state, 52, 65-66, 72,
101, 104, 106

Transition rites, x, 2, 122, 136
Transmutation, 77, 123-24
Traveling, fast, 100
Trees, symbolism of, 5, 6, 17-18,
67, 77-78, 89, 90, 93-94, 100,
119, 130

Trobriand Islands, 79-80
Tundum, 10
Tungus people, 88, 91
Tupi tribe, 77
Turrbal tribe, 14
Tutelary spirit, 66-68
Twanyirrika, 21

Twice-born, 53-54, 55, 58-59, 104

Ukraine, 46
Umba ceremony, 17
Unconscious, 128, 134

Underworld, descent to, 61-63, 78,
97, 102, 110-12, 130
See also Hell
Unmat jera tribe, 14, 97
Unthippa women, 7
Upanayana ceremony, 53 flf., 58, 104
Urns, 57

Vagina dentata, 51, 52, 63, 66
Vai’namoinen, 63-64
Vangla-Papua tribe, 27
Vasishta, 57
Veddah tribe, 42
Vendryes, J., 84
Vilela tribe, 77
Visions, 87, 106

Vocation, mystical, 2-3, 87-89, 96,
129

Volsunga Saga, 81-83
Vries, Jan de, 126
Vulva, and subincision, 26

Warburton Ranges, 97
Warriors, initiations of, 66, 67, 69,
81-85, 86-87
Watauineiwa, 29
Wauwalak Sisters, 48-50
Weaving, 45-46
Webster, Hutton, 1
Weiser, Lily, 83
Weule, Karl, 31
Whale, 36, 63-64
Wheat, ear of. 111
Widengren, G., 83
Wikander, Stig, 83
Wikeno Dancing Societies, 69, 70
Wildcat, 97

Winter season, 68, 83-84, 123
Winthuis, J., 25
Wintun tribe, 42
Wiradjuri tribe, 5, 8, 17
death symbolism of, 13-14
Wirz, Paul, 26
Witches, trials of, 124
Wizards, 5, 64, 887
Wolf, 72, 81-83, 109
Womb, 64, 120

cabin as symbol of, 36-37, 42
return to, xiv, 49-53, 61, 93, 98,
124

in Indian initiations, 53-57, 104
multiple meanings of, 57-60
Women, exclusion of, from initia-
tions, 4, 5, 7, 8, 16, 33
and Fedeli d* A more, 126-27

INDEX

175

Women — Continued
and heroic initiations, 84-85
initiations, see Girls* initiations
and men’s secret societies, 69, 71,
73, 83

secret societies, 45, 78-80
symbolic transformation into, 25-
26

Wonghibon subtribe, 14
World, center of, 70, 94, 95, 100,
119-20

creation of, x-xi, xv, 36, 45-46,
59

image of, 6, 69-70
sacred, 9-10
World Tree, 17, 89, 94

Xalpen, 30

Yakut people, 88, 90
Yamana tribe, 15
initiation ceremony, 28-29
Yao tribe, 44-45
Yaruro tribe, 77
Yetaita, 29
Yoga, 100, 106-8
Yuin tribe, 5, 7-8

Supreme Being and initiation cere*
mony, 11-13, 22
Yuri-ulu tribe, 15

Zagreus, 22
Zosimus, 123